Chapter IV. brings us to the case of workers who are all men, who are

engaged in a most necessary public service and employed for the most part by rich companies paying high dividends. Here the inexperienced would expect to find high wages and good conditions prevailing. In fact, however, we find, in the case of railway servants, that the hours of work imposed were so excessive as to constitute a public danger and to demand the intervention of the law. The drivers and conductors of trams and omnibuses have been shown to be in a large measure enslaved by the companies for which they work, their hours often cruelly long, their pay often reduced from a decent nominal to a quite inadequate actual wage, their conditions of work, in many cases, singularly oppressive and their liberty of passing into fresh employment, although not so completely barred as the railway servant’s, yet very seriously hampered and restricted. In short we behold a body of grown men, skilled and of good character, almost as unable as the isolated home worker to defend themselves against a strong and tyrannical employer.

Last of all, we come to the children. In these days we are continually talking in tones of alarm about a declining birth rate and are at last seriously considering how to check the appalling infant mortality that makes an annual massacre of the innocents; but most of us are still very little awake to the sacrifice of childhood that is daily being made in our midst. We pass a pale child in the street, carrying a long bundle in a black wrapper, and the sight makes no impression. But, to those of us who have seen the under side of London, that little figure is a type of unremunerative toil, of stunted growth, of weakened vitality and of wasted school teaching: an example of that most cruel form of improvidence described by the French proverb as “eating our wheat as grass.” Labour in childhood inevitably means, in nine cases out of ten, decadence in early manhood or womanhood; and the prevalence of it among ourselves is perhaps the most serious of national dangers. There is probably no branch of home work in which child labour is not involved, and but very few branches of retail trade. Our milk, our newspapers, our greengrocery are brought to us by small boys; young boys are out at all hours and in all weathers with parcel-delivering vans; and many and many a perambulator is pushed by a small girl whose chin is on a level with the handle. If, in 1901, there were, as the Interdepartmental Committee declared, _at least_ 200,000 school children working for wages, and if, as seems practically certain, the number is larger now, can we wonder that so many grown up workers have remained inefficient, incompetent and listless? We cannot have grain, if we choose to eat the wheat in the blade.

We see, then, that large bodies of British workpeople are, in these early years of the twentieth century, extremely overworked and underpaid. These evils are not, as is so often declared, a result of cheap selling. One of the worst examples of underpayment in the Sweated Industries Exhibition was a lady’s combination garment, of nainsook, the selling price of which was 22s.; and much of the work produced by the underpaid is sold at a good price to the well-to-do. On the other hand, under a well organised factory system, goods that are sold at a very low price are sometimes produced by workers receiving comparatively high wages. Nor is it true that any large proportion of these ill paid workers are either drunken or idle, or yet incompetent. Incompetent, indeed, they eventually become, if they are starved, physically and mentally, for a long enough period; but many of them remain competent for a surprising number of years. Very many of them are pathetically industrious, and by no means all are unskilled. Neither my reader nor I, for instance, could cover a racquet ball so that it would pass muster when inspected by the paymaster; it is improbable that either of us could cover an umbrella, and pretty certain that neither could make a passable artificial rose of even the poorest description. The driver of a motor omnibus is—in theory at least, and often in practice—a highly skilled mechanic; but his skill does not enable him (his trade union being still comparatively young and weak) to retain his freedom of action nor to resist the most exhausting and harassing conditions of labour.

The evil is thus not confined to women, nor to home workers, nor to any class or trade. Nor is it confined to any one country. Nearly every instance quoted could be matched from Germany and from America. “Sweating,” in short, invariably tends to appear wherever and whenever industry is not either highly organised or else stringently regulated by law.