A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy business house, receiving their board and six shillings per week for six working days of sixteen hours each.  The sandwich men get fourteenpence per day and find themselves.  The average weekly earnings of the hawkers and costermongers are not more than ten to twelve shillings.  The average of all common labourers, outside the dockers, is less than sixteen shillings per week, while the dockers average from eight to nine shillings.  These figures are taken from a royal commission report and are authentic.

Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and four children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making match boxes at 2.25d. per gross.  Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d., and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread!  She never knew a clay off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation.  Each day and every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours.  Her day’s stint was seven gross, for which she received 1s. 3.75d.  In the week of ninety-eight hours’ work, she made 7066 match boxes, and earned 4s. 10.25d., less per paste and thread.

Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note, after writing about the condition of the women workers, received the following letter, dated April 18, 1901:-

Sir,—­Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case.  I am a tie-maker, who, after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn’t earned a penny for more than ten years.

Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible, grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on five shillings per week!  Mr. Holmes visited her.  He had to squeeze to get into the room.  There lay her sick husband; there she worked all day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her husband and she performed all the functions of living and dying.  There was no space for the missionary to sit down, save on the bed, which was partially covered with ties and silk.  The sick man’s lungs were in the last stages of decay.  He coughed and expectorated constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist him in his paroxysms.  The silken fluff from the ties was not good for his sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers and wearers of the ties yet to come.

Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food.  He found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child.  Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker.  She paid five shillings a week rent.  Here are the last items in her housekeeping account:  Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread, 0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1.5d.; and firewood, 1d.  Good housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper’s coffin a-yawn for you.