FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS.
It is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two
countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied
by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe
that it understood the other. Not only the nation as a whole, however,
but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the
methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source
of bewilderment to the other. That conditions on both sides of the
Channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is
still unsolved for both England and the Continent, remains a truth,
though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that France
has solved one or two phases of the equation over which England is still
quite helpless.
There is a famous chapter in the history of Ireland, entitled "Snakes
in Ireland," the contents of which are as follows:--
"There are no snakes in Ireland."
On the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the
slums of Paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "There are no
slums in Paris."
In the English sense there certainly are none; and for the difference in
visible conditions, several causes are responsible. The searcher for
such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none
practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one
finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime
might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot
where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is
absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this
statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a
London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End
lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward nor inward
alleviation. Soot is king of the great city, and his prime ministers,
Smoke and Fog, work together to darken every haunt of man, and to shut
out every glimpse of sun or moon. The flying flakes are in the air.
Every breath draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall and
floor and person. The neatest and most determined fighter of dirt must
still be bond slave to its power; and eating and drinking and breathing
soot all day and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence in the
consequences, and only an instinctive battle with the outward effects.
For the average worker, at the needle at least, wages are too low to
admit of much soap; hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken
means just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens that
London poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that the
visitor in the house of the workers learns to wear a uniform which shows
as little as possible of the results of rising up and sitting down in
the soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire, works
its will no less surely.
Fresh from such experience, and with the memory of home and work room,
manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the
cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at
first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest
order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair
exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and she shares also in
the thrift which is equally a national possession, and the exercise of
which has freed France from the largest portion of her enormous debt.
The English workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or
bag-maker, is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform
of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of
dejection. She clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of
respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a
point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of
flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long
ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. The
shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge of a
condition from which emergence has become practically impossible. These
lank figures carry no charm of womanhood,--nothing that can draw from
sweater or general employer more than a sneer at the quality of the
labor of those waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand,
until for both the adjective comes to be "superfluous," and employer and
employed alike wonder why the earth holds them, and what good there is
in an existence made up simply of want and struggle.
Precisely the opposite condition holds for the French worker, who, in
the midst of problems as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of
her nation. She has learned to the minutest fraction what can be
extracted from every centime, and though she too must shiver with cold,
and go half-fed and half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of
something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable. She shares too
the conviction, which has come to be part of the general faith
concerning Paris, which seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness
and want are impossible. Even her beggars, a good proportion of them
laboriously made up for the parts they are to fill, find repression of
cheerfulness their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on the
sceptical observer of their methods, as if to make him a partner in the
encouraging and satisfactory nature of things in general. The little
seamstress who descends from her attic for the bread with its possible
salad or bit of cheese which will form her day's ration, smiles also as
she pauses to feel the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and
beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped out for Paris as
a whole everything that could by any chance be called slum.
Even in the narrowest street this stir of eager life penetrates, and
every Parisian shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily
existence. If shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters along
in _sabots_, congratulating herself that they are cheap and that they
never wear out. Custom, long-established and imperative, orders that she
shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes the revelation bound
up in the London worker's bonnet. Inherited instinct and training from
birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the needle. She makes
her own dress, and wears it with an air which may in time transfer
itself to something choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by
the the cheapness of the material. It may be only a print or some
woollen stuff of the poorest order; but it and every detail of her dress
represent something to which the English woman has not attained, and
which temperament and every fact of life will hinder her attaining.
As I write, the charcoal-woman has climbed the long flights to the fifth
floor, bending under the burden of an enormous sack of _charbon à
terre_, but smiling as she puts it down. She is mistress of a little
shop just round the corner, and she keeps the accounts of the wood and
coal bought by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her
earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day. Even she, black with
the coal-dust which she wastes no time in scrubbing off save on Sundays
when she too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces the hard
labor with light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a sou here and
there for the _dot_ of the baby who shares in the distribution of
coal-dust, and will presently trot by her side as assistant.
In the laundry just beyond, the women are singing or chattering, the
voices rising in that sudden fury of words which comes upon this people,
and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs
instantly and peacefully, to rise again on due occasion. Long hours,
exhausting labor, small wages, make no difference. The best worker
counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity, and the rate has
even fallen below this; yet they make no complaint, quite content with
the sense of companionship, and with the satisfaction of making each
article as perfect a specimen of skill as can be produced.
Here lies a difference deeper than that of temperament,--the fact that
the French worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and counts its
satisfactory appearance as a portion of the reward. Slop work, with its
demand for speedy turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order
per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the
French workwoman; and thus it happens that even slop work on this side
of the Channel holds some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift
it out of the depth to which it has fallen. But it is gaining ground,
fierce competition producing this effect everywhere; and the always
lessening ratio of wages which attends its production, must in time
bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere, unless the
tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative production takes its
place. With the French worker in the higher forms of needle industry we
shall deal in the next chapter, finding what differences are to be met
here also between French and English methods.