great portion of every workhouse should be regarded as appropriated to the reception of those aged or disabled persons who have spent their health and strength for the benefit of the community, and therefore have a claim upon it when that health and strength are gone. If, from the want of friends or relations, they are obliged to enter the workhouse, they ought to be treated with as much kindness and consideration as is compatible with their station. Experience tells me that they yearn for this more than for an increase of bodily comforts."
The public in general are but little aware of the condition in which a large portion of their fellow-creatures live; too often it is but a bare existence in which saving is an impossibility. The skilled artisan, mechanic, or labourer may indeed earn such wages as should provide against the evil day, and here it is where care and forethought should be diligently inculcated. But over and above these classes, there is a very large number of the miserably underpaid (perhaps educated in the first instance to no regular occupation), whose earnings cannot even suffice for their present wants. The sufferings and hardships of tailors and needlewomen, and the whole army of "slop-workers," were loudly proclaimed a few years ago, but, we fear, without much good resulting from the exposure. The system of excessive division of labour in all large establishments leads to the miserable under-payment of the employed, till the actual makers of clothing and other articles, even for Government purposes, receive such compensation as may well be considered a disgrace to a Christian nation.[1] We need scarcely
- ↑ The following is the testimony of a medical officer on the subject of the under-payment of needlewomen:—"Mr. Burch said he had been connected with the London Hospital for eleven years, and for five years with the Whitechapel Union. A large number of patients had been under his care, and he had carefully investigated a considerable number of cases, and was satisfied that needlewomen were the most ill-paid class of people, and the most hardworking on earth. He knew that numbers of them, with constitutions broken down, earned from 3s. to 4s. per week only, and for that very scanty pittance were compelled to work from three o'clock in the morning till ten at night."
A fact which will confirm the above testimony is taken from the Times of the 22nd January, 1858:—"A young woman was brought up for pledging trousers intrusted to her to make by Ellas Mears. A wholesale dealer in clothes gave materials for trousers to a man named Harris, who undertook to return them finished at 1s, per pair. Harris has a machine which effectually performs the stitching portion of the labour, and for that he received one-half of the 1s., giving Mears the remainder to complete the work. Mears in turn engaged the prisoner, and furnished her with twist, thread, &c., on the understanding that she was to receive 3½d. for finishing the job; but she, as alleged, having a child to support, and a husband who had deserted her, found the pittance accruing from her labours at this price insufficient to purchase necessaries, yielded to temptation and pledged the trousers, after finishing them, for 7s. A tailor in court observed that the materials probably cost from 8s. to 9s., and would be sold at 18s. Mears, whose cadaverous features and ill-clad body indicated an equal state of poverty with the prisoner's, said he only got about three-halfpence for his share after purchasing the small materials, and he had not any money to redeem the trousers." The magistrate may well have observed that "it was clear that this was a system which gradually ground to the dust the workpeople." The following cases of distress are selected from several in Southwark:—"A widow, making shirts at 4d. each,
