"In the chain shops of the Black Country the white man's burden presses
sore. It presses upon the women and the children with crushing weight.
It racks and shatters and ruptures the strongest men; it bows and twists
and disfigures the comeliest women, and it makes of the little children
such premature ruins that one can hardly look upon them without tears or
think of them without anger and indignation.
"At Cradley I saw a white-haired old woman carrying half a hundredweight
of chain to the fogger's round her shoulders; at Cradley I saw women
making chain with babies sucking at their breasts; at Cradley I spoke
to a married couple who had worked 120 hours in one week and had earned
18s. By their united labour; at Cradley I saw heavy-chain strikers who
were worn-out old men at thirty-five; at Cradley I found women on strike
for a price which would enable them to earn twopence an hour by dint
of labour which is to work what the Battle of Inkerman was to a Bank
Holiday review. At Cradley the men and the women are literally being
worked to death for a living that no gentleman would offer his dogs."
Thence to the domestic workshops. Old women, young girls, wives and
mothers working as if for dear life. Little children, unkempt and
woebegone, crouching amongst the cinders. No time for nursing or
housewifery in the chain trade. These women earned from 6s. to 9s. a
week. Some of them are, I see, in an advanced state of pregnancy.
And what pleasures have these people: what culture and beauty in their
lives? This:
"Were they ever so anxious to 'improve their minds,' what leisure have
they, what opportunity? Their lives are all swelter and sleep. Their
town a squalid, hideous place, ill-lighted and unpaved--the paths and
roads heel-deep in mire. Their houses are not homes--they have neither
comfort nor beauty, but are mere shelters and sleeping-pens.
"In all the place there is no news-room nor free library, nor even a
concert-hall or gymnasium. There is no cricket-ground, no assembly-room,
no public bath, no public park, nor public garden. Throughout all that
sordid, dolorous region I saw not so much as one tree, or flower-bed, or
fountain. Nothing bright or fair on which to rest the eye.
"But there are public-houses. And in several of them I tasted the
liquor, and spilled it on the floor."
Of how many towns and villages in Europe and America might the same be
said?
Of how many women are these terrible descriptions true?
In the evidence given before the Royal Commission on Canal Labour, it
was stated in evidence that men and women often worked for seven days
and nights on the canals, and in the winter.
Some of the witnesses declared that the work was unfit for women, that
it was "degrading." The Royal Commissioners could not understand the
word degrading, and asked how it could degrade a woman to steer a boat.
Here is one reply given by an angry witness:
Do you think it womanly work to push with a twenty-foot pole a boat
laden with 30 tons of coal? If you saw a mother of a family climbing
a four-foot wall, you'd think it was no work for women. I have seen a
woman knocked into the lock with a child at her breast by a sudden blow
of the tiller. I have seen my own sister-in-law climb the lock-gates at
one end to go and shut them at the other.
Many of the "cabins" on the narrow boats are about seven feet by five.
In such cabins sleep the "captain" and his family; in one case a man and
his wife, a girl of ten, a couple of younger children, and two boys of
fourteen and sixteen years of age.
Those are a few glimpses of the environment of the women and the
children of the poor.
I cannot quit the subject without again telling an experience which hurt
me like a wound. It was in a workhouse school: a school where master
and matron did the best they could do for the children so unfortunately
placed.