The Precariousness of Life.
What do you work at? You look ill.
It's me lungs.I make sulphuric acid.
You are a salt-cake man?
Yes.
Is it hard work?
It is damned hard work.
Why do you work at such a slavish trade?
I am married.I have children.Am I to starve and let them?
Why do you lead this life?
I am married.There's a terrible lot of men out of work in St.Helen's.
What do you call hard work?
My work.You come and heave them three-hundred-weight lumps with a fifty-pound bar, in that heat at the furnace door, and try it.
I will not.I am a philosopher.
Oh! Well, thee stick to t' job.Ours is t' vary devil.
-From interviews with workmen by ROBERT BLATCHFORD.
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 Icawn'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 worsen '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 the 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 cooperating 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 another 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.............................9,909In hospitals..............................6,559In lunatic asylums..........................278Total in public refuges..............16,746Commenting 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 labor 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,' etc.And in today'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 labor.
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 ($5.00) 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, $5.00, 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.
