THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
by Jack London
CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and
all that goes to make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth,
"coffee-house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.
Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word
was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic
frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless
groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians
of Grub Street.
But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
is a misnomer. Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee.
Not at all. You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or
money. True, you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you
something in a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it
and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.
And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.
Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty
places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in
a man or put self-respect into him. Table-cloths and napkins are
unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his
predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor.
In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the
muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat
because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.
This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the
zest with which he addresses himself to the board. Eating is a
necessity, and there are no frills about it. He brings in with him
a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with
him a fairly healthy appetite. When you see such a man, on his way
to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea
than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and
wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not
the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort
of stuff, to fit him for big day's work. And further, depend upon
it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or
quality of work that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of
meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.
As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a
breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not
dream of eating. Of course, he will pay only three or four pence
for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be
earning six shillings to his two or two and a half. On the other
hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in
the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned
out. So there are two sides to it. The man with the high standard
of living will always do more work and better than the man with the
low standard of living.
There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
American merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is
poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub,
good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working
populations of both countries. The ocean greyhounds have to pay for
speed and steam, and so does the workman. But if the workman is not
able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is
all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still
more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San
Francisco. {3} His standard of living has been rising all the time.
Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
way to work, many women sit on the side-walk with sacks of bread
beside them. No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they
walk along. They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea
to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses. It is
incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a
meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will
fall upon his employer and upon the nation. For some time, now,
statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!" It would show more
hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
England!"
Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have
stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative
housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
and mutton--dog-meat in the States. I would not vouch for the clean
fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers. I kept my
eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed
it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the
lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into
taking it. All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken
away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies
settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.
The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and
sleeping room for the night. There it is exposed to the sickness
and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and
rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.
The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at
all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of
what he eats. Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair
criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or
cocoa tastes like. The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-
houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea
and coffee.
A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far
from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.
"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi
don't mind. Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that
fynt . . . "
She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she
held a penny. The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a
careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.
I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the
appeal would be received. It was four in the afternoon, and she
looked faint and sick. The woman hesitated an instant, then brought
a large plate of "stewed lamb and young peas." I was eating a plate
of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and
that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.
However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the
proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth
that the poor are the most charitable.
The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other
side of the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.
We ate steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly,
explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me, -
"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus," she confirmed, if anything with
greater and more explosive glee. "Hi sold a box o' matches! That's
'ow Hi got the penny."
"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.
"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to
her plate.
"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would,
but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside
volunteered to me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make
an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many
pots."
"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply
to my questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."
One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall
not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square,
to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score. (By the way,
one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly
dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).
The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the
counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.
"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.
"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you
think?" I retorted.
"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
"I makes 'em," quoth I.
She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver,
and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I
said.
"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous. Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what
little I had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she
gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.
While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and
900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are
registered as living in common lodging-houses--known in the
vernacular as "doss-houses." There are many kinds of doss-houses,
but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to
the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by
smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that
one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not mean that
the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that
life in them is degrading and unwholesome.
"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
caricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes
to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing
in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and
never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite
different from that of hotel life.
This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big
private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes. Far
from it. They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon
the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more
for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make
them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should
be who does his work in the world.
The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.
I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
confine myself to the bigger and better ones. Not far from
Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place
inhabited almost entirely by working men. The entrance was by way
of a flight of steps descending from the side-walk to what was
properly the cellar of the building. Here were two large and
gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate. I had intended
to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my
appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with
watching other men cook and eat.
One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough
wooden table, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not
over-clean table constituted his butter. Into it he dipped his
bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big
mug. A piece of fish completed his bill of fare. He ate silently,
looking neither to right nor left nor across at me. Here and there,
at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently. In
the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation. A feeling
of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place. Many of them sat and
brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as
Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be
punished so.
From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured
into the range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had
noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me
into the street for fresh air.
On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin," took my receipt for the
same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the
smoking-room. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several
checkerboards were being used by young working-men, who waited in
relays for their turn at the games, while many men were sitting
around, smoking, reading, and mending their clothes. The young men
were hilarious, the old men were gloomy. In fact, there were two
types of men, the cheerful and the sodden or blue, and age seemed to
determine the classification.
But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the
remotest suggestion of home. Certainly there could be nothing home-
like about it to you and me, who know what home really is. On the
walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating
the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put
out, and nothing remained but bed. This was gained by descending
again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly
doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper
regions. I went to the top of the building and down again, passing
several floors filled with sleeping men. The "cabins" were the best
accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room
alongside of it in which to undress. The bedding was clean, and
with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault. But there was no
privacy about it, no being alone.
To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have
merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-
crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise
properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of
a large, barnlike room, and there you have it. There are no
ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores
from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer
neighbours come plainly to your ears. And this cabin is yours only
for a little while. In the morning out you go. You cannot put your
trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind
you, or anything of the sort. In fact, there is no door at all,
only a doorway. If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's
hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations
which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little
soul of your own and less to say about it.
Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should
have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in
his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look
out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can
accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries
about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up
pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or
bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in short, one place of his own on
the earth of which he can say: "This is mine, my castle; the world
stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master." He will be a
better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.
I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened. I went
from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers. They were young men,
from twenty to forty, most of them. Old men cannot afford the
working-man's home. They go to the workhouse. But I looked at the
young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows.
Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's
arms. They were lovable, as men are lovable. They were capable of
love. A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such
redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and
harsher. And I wondered where these women were, and heard a
"harlot's ginny laugh." Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly,
The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.
CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
I was talking with a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife
had wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals
of the case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had
obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings
each week for the support of her and the five children. "But look
you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten
shillings? S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me,
so I cawn't work. S'posin' I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or
the cholera. Wot's she goin' to do, eh? Wot's she goin' to do?"
He shook his head sadly. "No 'ope for 'er. The best she cawn do is
the work'ouse, an' that's 'ell. An' if she don't go to the
work'ouse, it'll be a worse 'ell. Come along 'ith me an' I'll show
you women sleepin' in a passage, a dozen of 'em. An' I'll show you
worse, wot she'll come to if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten
shillings."
The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration. He
knew conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his
wife's grasp on food and shelter. For her game was up when his
working capacity was impaired or destroyed. And when this state of
affairs is looked at in its larger aspect, the same will be found
true of hundreds of thousands and even millions of men and women
living amicably together and co-operating in the pursuit of food and
shelter.
The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the
poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages
between them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per
cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief,
and in London, according to the statistics of the London County
Council, twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to
the parish for relief. Between being driven to the parish for
relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference,
yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in
themselves. One in every four in London dies on public charity,
while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of
the word.
It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London
people who die on charity.
In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population
was less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for
every succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has
been greater in London than in all England. Yet, from the
Registrar-General's Report for 1886, the following figures are
taken:-
Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-
In workhouses 9,909
In hospitals 6,559
In lunatic asylums 278
Total in public refuges 16,746
Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering
that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that
one in every three London adults will be driven into one of these
refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour
class must of course be still larger."
These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the
average worker to pauperism. Various things make pauperism. An
advertisement, for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday
morning's paper:-
"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and
invoicing: wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week. Apply by letter,"
&c.
And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age
and an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various
tasks since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to
breaking stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the
task. He had never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he
said. The magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven
days' hard labour.
Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the
accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the
husband, father, and bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and
three children, living on the ticklish security of twenty shillings
per week--and there are hundreds of thousands of such families in
London. Perforce, to even half exist, they must live up to the last
penny of it, so that a week's wages (one pound) is all that stands
between this family and pauperism or starvation. The thing happens,
the father is struck down, and what then? A mother with three
children can do little or nothing. Either she must hand her
children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to
do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops
for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale
of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three
children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation,
till decay and death end their suffering.
To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-
A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four
gross. Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d.
for glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them
was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.
In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-
hat maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the
price she obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each. For that price
she had to provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."
Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done
no wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned.
The thing happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-
winner, was struck down. There is no guarding against it. It is
fortuitous. A family stands so many chances of escaping the bottom
of the Abyss, and so many chances of falling plump down to it. The
chance is reducible to cold, pitiless figures, and a few of these
figures will not be out of place.
Sir A. Forwood calculates that -
1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.
But these are only the accidents of industry. The high mortality of
the people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part. The
average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five
years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is
thirty years. That is to say, the person in the West End has twice
the chance for life that the person has in the East End. Talk of
war! The mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades away
to insignificance. Here, in the heart of peace, is where the blood
is being shed; and here not even the civilised rules of warfare
obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms are killed
just as ferociously as the men are killed. War! In England, every
year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement
by disease.
In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children
die before five years of age. And there are streets in London where
out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during
the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before
they are five years old. Slaughter! Herod did not do quite so
badly.
That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does
no better substantiation can be given than the following extract
from a recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not
applicable to Liverpool alone:-
In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts,
and the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing
largely to the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which
for so many years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into
their porous material. Singular testimony to the absence of
sunlight in these courts was furnished by the action of the Parks
and Gardens Committee, who desired to brighten the homes of the
poorest class by gifts of growing flowers and window-boxes; but
these gifts could not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS
AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE UNWHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS, AND
WOULD NOT LIVE.
Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
George's parishes (London parishes):-
Percentage of
Population Death-rate
Overcrowded per 1000
St. George's West 10 13.2
St. George's South 35 23.7
St. George's East 40 26.4
Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers
are employed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far
more precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on
life. In the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet
and wet clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia,
and severe rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments
the fine dust produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and
the woman who starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to
break up and go to pieces at thirty. The chemical labourers, picked
from the strongest and most splendidly-built men to be found, live,
on an average, less than forty-eight years.
Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade: "Potter's dust does not
kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly
into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally
ceases."
Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-
guns and pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead
trades. Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a
young, healthy, well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead
factory:-
Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It
may be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her
teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision
or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her
friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually
deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the
arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the
convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes
universal. This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which
she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in
severity, in one of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or
perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few
hours, or days, during which violent headache is complained of, or
she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen
as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she is found
wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect. Without further
warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with nearly the
normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard; she is
suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or
passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies. In
another case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache
disappears and the patient recovers, only to find that she has
completely lost her eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or
permanent.
And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-
Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became
a white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the
ladder in the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line
along her gums, which shows that the system is under the influence
of the lead. He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.
They did so, and she died.
Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.
Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
factory for TWENTY YEARS, having colic once only during that time.
Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One
morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all
power in both her wrists.
Eliza H., aged twenty-five, AFTER FIVE MONTHS at lead works, was
seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused
by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then
the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
died in two days of acute lead poisoning.
Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The
children of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only
to die from the convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born
prematurely, or die within the first year."
And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young
girl of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the
industrial battlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware
brusher, wherein lead poisoning is encountered. Her father and
brother were both out of employment. She concealed her illness,
walked six miles a day to and from work, earned her seven or eight
shillings per week, and died, at seventeen.
Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the
workers into the Abyss. With a week's wages between a family and
pauperism, a month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery
almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do
not always recover when work is to be had again. Just now the daily
papers contain the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the
Dockers' Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for
months past, have not averaged a weekly income of more than from
four to five shillings. The stagnated state of the shipping
industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
condition of affairs.
To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there
is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old
age. Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It
is all a matter of chance. Everything depends upon the thing
happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do. Precaution
cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it. If they remain on the
industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance
against heavy odds. Of course, if they are favourably made and are
not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial
battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man can do is to
join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross
nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other
than a nightmare.
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