With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the needle-women of London are exploited.  The girls employed in stay-making have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes.  And what wages do they get?  I do not know; but this I know, that the middle-man who has to give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work among the needle-women, receives 1.5d. per piece.  From this he deducts his own pay, at least .5d., so that 1d. at most reaches the pocket of the girl.  The girls who sew neckties must bind themselves to work sixteen hours a day, and receive 4.5s. a week. {210} But the shirtmakers’ lot is the worst.  They receive for an ordinary shirt 1.5d., formerly 2d.-3d.; but since the workhouse of St. Pancras, which is administered by a Radical board of guardians, began to undertake work at 1.5d., the poor women outside have been compelled to do the same.  For fine, fancy shirts, which can be made in one day of eighteen hours, 6d. is paid.  The weekly wage of these sewing-women according to this and according to testimony from many sides, including both needle-women and employers, is 2s. 6d. to 3s. for most strained work continued far into the night.  And what crowns this shameful barbarism is the fact that the women must give a money deposit for a part of the materials entrusted to them, which they naturally cannot do unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers very well know), redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the materials, they must appear before a Justice of the Peace, as happened a sewing-woman in November, 1843.  A poor girl who got into this strait and did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844.  These women usually live in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where as many crowd together as the space can possibly admit, and where, in winter, the animal warmth of the workers is the only heat obtainable.  Here they sit bent over their work, sewing from four or five in the morning until midnight, destroying their health in a year or two and ending in an early grave, without being able to obtain the poorest necessities of life meanwhile. {211} And below them roll the brilliant equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps away some pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than they can earn in a year.

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Such is the condition of the English manufacturing proletariat.  In all directions, whithersoever we may turn, we find want and disease permanent or temporary, and demoralisation arising from the condition of the workers; in all directions slow but sure undermining, and final destruction of the human being physically as well as mentally.  Is this a state of things which can last?  It cannot and will not last.  The workers, the great majority of the nation, will not endure it.  Let us see what they say of it.

LABOUR MOVEMENTS.