In | brought to the forge. Free trace-chains! God forbid that any Kentucky girl or woman should ever work at such unwomanly employment for such starvation wages, even though it be to furnish free trace-chains to my friend and his constituents. (Applause.] The poor of London as badly conditioned as the Sans Culottes of France. It did not surprise me to learn that distinguished prelates of the Established Church had in a church congress warned those to whom they had a right to speak with authority that the condition of the poor of England, as they had found it upon personal inspection within a short distance from the palaces of the Queen and of the Prince of Wales, was as bad as that of the French sans culottes in the years immediately preceding the sanguinary revolution of 1793. A family of nine living in a cellar near Bloomsbury Square no larger than the area of six church-pews. A Dissenting clergyman, the eloquent and devoted pastor of Bloomsbury Chapel, which stands but a few hundred feet from Bloomsbury Square and the solid middle-class mansions around it, said to his congregation that he had found but a short distance from the pulpit from which he spoke, a family of nine, including father, mother, sons and daughters, who occupied a cellar not larger than the space marked by six of the pews his hearers occupied. "This was not," he said, "a peculiar case, but one of many thousands." Another wretched family near Westminster Abbey - A full-grown girl devoured by vermin. Within a week we have read, at least those who watch the papers for such indications of the condition of the British people, of a family found by the coroner near Westminster's grand old abbey, and in one of the most aristocratic quarters of London, in a cellar without a window, one member of which, a girl of full age, had just died, but whese flesh had been largely consumed by vermin before death came to her relief. These are said to be familiar chapters in the lives of tens of thousands who, though able and willing to work, can find no place among the wage-earners of free-trade England, who our Democratic friends present as a national exemplar from whom they would have us accept as indisputable truths dogmas the prevalence of which has produced in that country these terrible results. Trace-chains made by English women at 25 cents per day minus the cost of fuel and forge and rods. "Yes," I think I hear some of you reply to me," you studied the poverty of London, which is, we are ready to admit, unparalleled." No; I spent ten days, un known to everybody but my daughter, who was my companion, in Birmingham, and in visiting the manufacturing towns around that rich and beautiful city. We visited so much of the overcrowded precincts of the city itself as a lady might ride into, and in charge of a policeman I went beyond these limits. Our visits embraced Halesowen, Lye, Lye-Waste, and Cradley, where we found women making nails, trace-chains, heavy fire-bricks, and galvanizing hollow-ware. observe among those who do me the honor to be present, my friend from Kentucky [Mr. Turner], who comes to each succeeding Congress on the doctrine of free trace-chains, a bill to transfer which article to the free list he never fails to introduce. The introduction of the bill does nobody any harm, and I shall continue to welcome him as long as I shall be returned and a Democrat comes from that district. I Mr. TURNER of Kentucky. I never weary in well doing, and I hope that after a while you will grant us that reasonable request. Mr. KELLEY. Oh, yes; you ought to have free trace-chains, for we learned that the women who make them, if they are quick and good hands, can realize 25 cents a day. [Applause on the Republican side.] And all that they have to pay out of their weekly wage of 68. is 1s. 6d. for the forge and fuel, and another 6d. Halesowen we found two men at work making light In one of the smallest and dingiest of the forges of nails, such as girls are put to making when at fourteen years of age the British law will allow them to leave One of these men was a cripple, and the other was school and enter upon their lives of unwomanly toil. evidently suffering from pulmonary disease. One of them by expending his force for full time could earn 38., per week and the other 48., from each of which sums are deducted weekly 18. for fuel and furnace rent, so that at the close of the week they had as a net result of their joint toil $1.25. In the villages I have named, all of which are appendages of Birmingham, we also saw English girls and matrons making large fire-bricks; one carrying against her breast or stomach heavy lumps of wet clay, out of which her co-worker, it may be her sister or mother, molded the immense bricks which she who had brought the clay carried to a heated space near to where she was to pick up her next load of wet clay. Why, you ask, do these girls engage in such work? The answer is a simple one: they prefer to make bricks because they can make 68., or a dollar and a half, net, per week, while their sisters who make nails or chains cannot assuredly earn so much, and are, as I have said, subject to a charge of 18. 6d. per week for fuel and rent of forge. The deadly galvanizing rooms of CradleyGirl galvanizers at $1.75 per week. The chief specialties of Cradley are chains and hollow-ware. There we saw girls galvanizing stewpans, boilers, bath-tubs, and other articles of like nature. The desperate struggle for life imposed on British toilers by cheap goods and low wages is well illustrated at Cradley. The assured receipt of $1.50 maker's forge to the brick-shed. a week will tempt women from the nail or chainThe pay of a galvanizer is $1.75 per week; and for this additional shilling girls will pass the forge and the brick-shed to of them knows that in less than six months the gases engage in a galvanizing room, although the strongest generated by the process will vitally impair her health. The villages around Birmingham - Lye, LyeWaste, and Cradley. In this connection I submit a brief extract from one of Miss Kelley's published letters: "It is characteristic of the neighborhood of Birmingham that each village has one industry; thus nailers and chainmakers are as thoroughly separated as though their work differed radically, and separation were needed. But the difference between Lye-Waste and Cradley is slight. There are the same forges, the same hovels, the same dusty roads, and the same industrious people. To tell the story of the chainmakers whom we watched at their forges, is merely to repeat the picture of Stocking Lane, and this I have no wish to do. Here and there, however, the forges are interspersed with factories and 'works,' and the facts as to these works illustrate some of the ills to which the nailers eagerly fly in their efforts to escape from their peculiar slavery. "In one establishment we were shown young women at work on galvanizing pails, and our guide (who had come over from Lye-Waste for a benefit) observed privately concerning them, 'They'm flyin' from nailin', and they thinks it's a fine thing to get seven shillin's a week. But they gets poorly, and then they gets sick, and then their parents has to keep 'em, and they don't earn nothin' for a long time till they'm well again.' This we are prepared to believe, for we found difficulty in breathing in the first room to which an intelligent foreman showed us. This was a large, dusky room with a high ceiling and arrangements for ventila. tion with which we could find no fault. But in the CONDITION OF UNPROTECTED LABOR IN EUROPE. steaming fluid. Back of this stood a man dipping pails in the cauldron and handing them to young girls, who swiftly rolled each pail in a heap of sawdust, then deftly brushed the fluid over the metal surface, assuring an equal coating to every part. A few moments of breathing the fumes from the cauldron made our retreat to the sultry out-door air very refreshing, and sufficed to convince us of the unwholesome nature of this work, even before we noticed long rows of carboys of vitriol, which furnish one ingredient of the galvanizing fluid. The inspection is severe,' observed the foreman. The works are closely watched, and if a girl works a half-hour over time we're brought up roundly. It's very unwholesome work."" This brief extract will convince you that I do not speak of things of which I have merely read. No, gentlemen, I speak of incidents that I saw, and of people with whom and whose employers I conversed. Sir, I do not want American goods to become so cheap that, as my distinguished friend, the chairman of the committee on Ways and Means (Mr. Morrison), said, we can sell to other people. God forbid that American labor shall ever be embodied in any production that shall be cheap enough to be sold at Halesowen, Lye, Lye-Waste, Cradley, and other manufacturing villages that surround Birmingham. [Applause.] 30,000 Canal Children Untaught - Families there are close upon 30,000 of these children of school he and his wife and his children have to lie. "A house in any of the villages referred to, as small or smaller than these, of similar construction, with three rooms, the lower one a living-room, parlor, kitchen, and sitting-room, with broken stone floor, and chambers above, furnishes sleeping accommodations to the parents, the sons and daughters, and their children, all of whom are thus crowded into two little sleeping rooms. Yet it is of these sets of three apartments, contracted, dark, undrained, and unventilated, that those apostles of falsehood, Professors Sumner of Yale and Perry of Williams College, speak when they compare their rental with that of the homes of American artisans to prove the superior condition of the working people of Great Britain to that of those of the United States." The terrible mysteries and miseries of Lon don-British Statements. Representative Chace of Rhode Island, in his speech on the Morrison Tariff Bill, April, 1884, after stating that there is in England a standing army of 922,000 paupers, and that in London alone there have been as many as 500,000 in a hard season, who have received outdoor aid, quotes from a pamphlet called "Outcast London," published in the fall of 1883, by the Congregational Union in London. That pamphlet says of these miserable people: Two cautions it is important to bear in mind. First, the information given does not refer to select cases. It simply reveals a state of things which is found in house after house, court after court, street after street. Secondly, there has been absolutely no exaggeration. It is a plain recital of plain facts. Indeed, no respectable printer would print, and certainly no decent family would admit even the dryest statement of the horrors and infamies discovered in one brief visitation from house to house. So far from making the worst of our facts for the purpose of appealing to emotion, we have been compelled to tone down everything, and | wholly to omit what most needs to be known, or the The condition in which they live. houses has a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three chil "Every room in these rotten and reeking tenementdren, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recoverrunning about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground ing from her eighth confinement, and the children Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. child who had been dead thirteen days. Her husmitted suicide. Here lives a widow and her six band, who was a cabman, had shortly before commother, and six children, two of whom are ill with children, including one daughter of 29, another of 21, and a son of 27. Another apartment contains father, scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, into the street in the early evening, because she lets from 29 years of age downwards, live, eat, and sleep her room for immoral purposes until long after midtogether. Here is a mother who turns her children if they have not found some miserable shelter elsenight, when the poor little wretches creep back again where. Where there are beds they are simply heaps these miserable beings find rest only upon the filthy of dirty rags, shavings, or straw, but for the most part herself occupies the only bed, and lets the floor to a boards. The tenant of this room is a widow, who married couple for 28. 6d. per week. In many cases matters are made worse by the unhealthy occupations Here you are choked as you enter by the air laden with particles of the superfluous fur pulled from the followed by those who dwell in these habitations. skins of rabbits, rats, dogs, and other animals in their preparation for the furrier. Here the smell of paste odors, overpowers you; or it may be the fragrance of stale fish or vegetables, not sold on the previous day, or of drying match-boxes mingling with other sickly but if they did, it is questionable whether much would and kept in the room overnight. Even when it is possible to do so, the people seldom open their windows, charged with poison than the atmosphere within. be gained, for the external is scarcely less heavily Poverty. honestly; for, notwithstanding the sickening revela- In a In the Dublin Freeman's Journal the following advertisement appears: "WANTED-Strong humble girl to assist in mind. ing children and go of messages; age, 15; 8 shillings per quarter. Apply at 59 Harcourt Street, 11 o'clock to 2, Monday." they are daily face to face with the contrast between | 871 families had only one room to live in. their wretched earnings and those which are the prod-majority of these cases the families living in one uce of sin. A child seven years old is known easily room contained five or more persons; in some cases as to make 108. 6d. a week by thieving; but what can be many as nine." earn by such work as match-box making, for which 24d. a gross is paid, the maker having to find his own fire for drying the boxes, and his own paste and string? Before he can gain as much as the young thief, he must make 56 gross of match-boxes a week, or 1,296 a day. It is needless to say that this is impossible, for even adults can rarely make more than an average of half that number. How long, then, must the little hands toil before they can earn the price of the scantiest meal! Women, for the work of trousers' finishing (i.e., sewing in linings, making button-holes, and stitching on the buttons), receive 24d. a pair, and have to find their own thread. We ask a woman who is making tweed trousers how much she can earn in a day, and are told 18. But what does a day mean to this poor soul? Seventeen hours! From five in the morning to ten at night: no pause for meals. She eats her crust and drinks a little tea as she works, making, in very truth, with her needle and thread, not her living only, but her shroud. For making men's shirts, these women are paid 10d, a dozen; lawn-tennis aprons, 3d. a dozen; and babies' hoods, from 18. 6d. to 28. 6d. a dozen. In St. George's in-the-East large numbers of women and children, some of the latter only seven years old, are employed in sack-making, for which they get a farthing each. In one house was found a widow and her half-idiot daughter making paillasses at 1d. each. Here is a woman who has a sick husband and a little child to look after. She is employed at shirt-finishing at 3d. a dozen, and by the utmost effort can only earn 6d. a day, out of which she has to find her own thread. Another, with a crippled hand, maintains herself and a blind husband by match-box making, for which she is remunerated on the liberal scale mentioned above; and, out of her 24d. a gross, she has to pay a girl a penny a gross to help her. Others obtain at Covent Garden, in the season, 1d. or 2d. a peck for shelling peas, or 6d. a basket for walnuts; and they do well if their labor brings them 10d. or 18. a day. With men it is, comparatively speaking, no better. "My master," says one man visited by a recent writer in the Fortnightly Review, "gets a pound for what he gives me 38. for making." And this it is easy to believe, when we know thut for a pair of fishing boots which will be sold at three guineas the poor workman receives 58. 3d. if they are made to order, or 48. 6d. if made for stock. An old tailor and his wife are employed in making policemen's overcoats. They have to make, finish, hot-press, put on the buttons, and find their own thread, and for all this they receive 28. 10d. for each coat. This old couple work from half-past six in the morning until ten at night, and between them can just manage to make a coat in two days. Here is a mother who has taken away whatever articles of clothing she can strip from her four little children without leaving them absolutely naked. She has pawned them not for drink, but fo coals and food. A shilling is all she can procure, and with this she has bought seven pounds of coals and a loaf of bread. We might fill page after page with these dreary details, but they would become sadly monotonous, for it is the same everywhere. Professor Huxley says that in his voyage around the world and in all his studies of savage life he found no people so miserable, wretched, and degraded as those who exist in the poorer quarters of London. Further British testimony as to the degraded condition of the British laborer. Mr. Chace gave further English testimony on the condition of labor in Great Britain and Ireland as follows: Lord Salisbury, the great Tory leader of Great Britain, one of the most prominent men in England, last fall published the following: Thousands of families have only a single room to live in. It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, or the impulses which they must give to vice. Three schools were taken and the condition of the children was For minding the children and running on errands the "strong humble girl" will receive $8 per year, or 67 cents a month. Happy land! The Glasgow Herald last month stated that there are in the city of Glasgow 45,000 families each living in a single room. These are among the worst of the pictures in Great Britain. But there are millions upon millions of people employed in her industrial pursuits who fare but little better. In Manchester, in Oldham, in Birmingham, in Bradford, where these worsted goods are made to which I have referred, if a man (or woman) leaves his work or loses his place, hundreds are ready to step in. The wages they earn are but barely sufficient to support life. Their flagging energies are kept up by constant draughts of beer. There is but one great river in England, and that is not laid down in the map. It is a river of beer, running down the throats of her people, in which they drown their sorrows. The London Times says of the agricultural laborer in England: "His condition is hopeless; once a peasant, always a peasant." Joseph Arch said: "The agricultural laborers of England look with envy upon the beasts of burden." Comfortless condition of the laboring classes in Manchester, England. Mr. Robert Porter, late Secretary of the Tariff Commission, writes of the condition of the laboring classes in Manchester: Some of the houses had bare wooden floors, some had red brick floors, some had bare flag-stones. Hardly one had a vestige of carpet. By far the largest proportion of the operatives live from hand to mouth, generally in one room, in which a few chairs, a deal table, a bedstead, four or five cups and saucers, a few dishes and plates, a wash-tub, a sauce-pan, and a kettle comprise the chief articles of furniture. Every thing in many cases, including the sleeping and family washing, is done in the general room. An old shawl and a dirty print gown, and wooden shoes which clattter on the sidewalk, form their toilet. The wretched working people of Dundee— They live in one and two roomed "nurseries of disease." Mr. Porter writes also of the spinning and weaving districts of Dundee: best of the workingmen only live from hand to mouth The wages are not over $2.25 per week, and the and in squalid misery. In some districts the operatives live in houses totally unfit for human habitations; they are low one-story buildings with but one room on a floor and windows about two feet square. I actually found in some whole families living like animals on the bare ground, and in one the mother of a family lay dying literally of starvation! The children were poor, pinched, half-starved little creatures. I visited, says he, at least a dozen houses in this part of Dundee and found the inmates almost all in the same state of misery and want. In one district alone 50,000 operatives were receiving alms annually. They lived principally on bread. The American consul at Dundee, Mr. Wells, in his report to the State Department of November, 1883, writes: The average wages of the working people in this town is for skilled artisans $6.87 per week of 54 hours' work in the case of ironworkers, and 51 hours for tradesmen connected with house-building. Laborers get $4.75 per week of 57 hours. There are workmen steaming fluid. Back of this stood a man dipping pails in the cauldron and handing them to young girls, who swiftly rolled each pail in a heap of sawdust, then deftly brushed the fluid over the metal surface, assuring an equal coating to every part. A few moments of breathing the fumes from the cauldron made our retreat to the sultry out-door air very refreshing, and sufficed to convince us of the unwholesome nature of this work, even before we noticed long rows of car. boys of vitriol, which furnish one ingredient of the galvanizing fluid. The inspection is severe,' observed the foreman. "The works are closely watched, and if a girl works a half-hour over time we're brought up roundly. It's very unwholesome work."" This brief extract will convince you that I do not speak of things of which I have merely read. No, gentlemen, I speak of incidents that I saw, and of people with whom and whose employers I conversed. Sir, I do not want American goods to become so cheap that, as my distinguished friend, the chairman of the committee on Ways and Means (Mr. Morrison), said, we can sell to other people. God forbid that American labor shall ever be embodied in any production that shall be cheap enough to be sold at Halesowen, Lye, Lye-Waste, Cradley, and other manufacturing villages that surround Birmingham. [Applause.] 30,000 Canal Children Untaught - Families "A house in any of the villages referred to, as small or smaller than these, of similar construction, with three rooms, the lower one a living-room, parlor, kitchen, and sitting-room, with broken stone floor, and chambers above, furnishes sleeping accommodations to the parents, the sons and daughters, and their children, all of whom are thus crowded into two little sleeping rooms. "Yet it is of these sets of three apartments, contracted, dark, undrained, and unventilated, that those apostles of falsehood, Professors Sumner of Yale and Perry of Williams College, speak when they compare their rental with that of the homes of American artisans to prove the superior condition of the working people of Great Britain to that of those of the United States." wholly to omit what most needs to be known, or the ears and eyes of our readers would have been insuffer ably outraged. The condition in which they live. "We do not say the condition of their homes, for how can those places be called homes, compared with which the lair of a wild beast would be a comfortabl and healthy spot? Few who will read these page have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave-ship. with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from To get into them you have to penetrate courts reeking accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of them which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air, and which rarely know the virtues of a drop of cleansing water. You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath every step, and which, in some places, have already broken down, leaving gaps that imperil the limbs and lives of the unwary. You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance to the dens in which these thousands of beings who belong, as much as you, to the race for whom Christ died, herd together. Have you pitied the poor casks, or under any shelter which they can find in the creatures who sleep under railway arches, in carts or comparison with those whose lot it is to seek refuge open air? You will see that they are to be envied in here. Eight feet square-that is about the average size of very many of these rooms. Every room in these rotten and reeking tenementinspector reports finding a father, mother, three chil houses has a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary dren, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recover. ing from her eighth confinement, and the children Here are seven people living in one underground running about half naked and covered with dirt. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. band, who was a cabman, had shortly before comchild who had been dead thirteen days. Her husmitted suicide. Here lives a widow and her six children, including one daughter of 29, another of 21, mother, and six children, two of whom are ill with and a son of 27. Another apartment contains father, scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, from 29 years of age downwards, live, eat, and sleep together. Here is a mother who turns her children into the street in the early evening, because she lets her room for immoral purposes until long after midnight, when the poor little wretches creep back again The terrible mysteries and miseries of Lon- if they have not found some miserable shelter else don-British Statements. where. Where there are beds they are simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings, or straw, but for the most part Representative Chace of Rhode Island, in these miserable beings find rest only upon the filthy boards. The tenant of this room is a widow, who his speech on the Morrison Tariff Bill, April, herself occupies the only bed, and lets the floor to a 1884, after stating that there is in England a married couple for 2s. 6d. per week. In many cases standing army of 922,000 paupers, and that matters are made worse by the unhealthy occupations in London alone there have been as many as followed by those who dwell in these habitations. Here you are choked as you enter by the air laden 500,000 in a hard season, who have received with particles of the superfluous fur pulled from the outdoor aid, quotes from a pamphlet called skins of rabbits, rats, dogs, and other animals in their "Outcast London," published in the fall of preparation for the furrier. Here the smell of paste 1883, by the Congregational Union in Lon-odors, overpowers you; or it may be the fragrance of or of drying match-boxes mingling with other sickly don. That pamphlet says of these miserable stale fish or vegetables, not sold on the previous day, people: and kept in the room overnight. Even when it is posbut if they did, it is questionable whether much would sible to do so, the people seldom open their windows, be gained, for the external is scarcely less heavily charged with poison than the atmosphere within. Two cautions it is important to bear in mind. First, the information given does not refer to select cases. It simply reveals a state of things which is found in house after house, court after court, street after street. Secondly, there has been absolutely no exaggeration. It is a plain recital of plain facts. Indeed, no respectable printer would print, and certainly no decent family would admit even the dryest statement of the horrors and infamies discovered in one brief visitation from house to house. So far from making the worst of our facts for the purpose of appealing to emotion, Poverty. The poverty, we mean, of those who try to live honestly; for, notwithstanding the sickening revelations of immorality which have been disclosed to us, those who endeavor to earn their bread by honest work far outnumber the dishonest. And it is to their In a In the Dublin Freeman's Journal the following advertisement appears: "WANTED- Strong humble girl to assist in minding children and go of messages; age, 15; 8 shillings per quarter. Apply at 59 Harcourt Street, 11 o'clock to 2, Monday." they are daily face to face with the contrast between | 871 families had only one room to live in. their wretched earnings and those which are the prod-majority of these cases the families living in one uce of sin. A child seven years old is known easily room contained five or more persons; in some cases as to make 108. 6d. a week by thieving; but what can he many as nine.' earn by such work as match-box making, for which 24d. a gross is paid, the maker having to find his own fire for drying the boxes, and his own paste and string? Before he can gain as much as the young thief, he must make 56 gross of match-boxes a week, or 1,296 a day. It is needless to say that this is impossible, for even adults can rarely make more than an average of half that number. How long, then, must the little hands toil before they can earn the price of the scantiest meal! Women, for the work of trousers' finishing (i.e., sewing in linings, making button-holes, and stitching on the buttons), receive 24d. a pair, and have to find their own thread. We ask a woman who is making tweed trousers how much she can earn in a day, and are told 18. But what does a day mean to this poor soul? Seventeen hours! From five in the morning to ten at night: no pause for meals. She eats her crust and drinks a little tea as she works, making, in very truth, with her needle and thread, not her living only, but her shroud. For making men's shirts, these women are paid 10d. a dozen; lawn-tennis aprons, 3d. a dozen; and babies' hoods, from 18. 6d. to 2s. 6d. a dozen. In St. George's in-the-East large numbers of women and children, some of the latter only seven years old, are employed in sack-making, for which they get a farthing each. In one house was found a widow and her half-idiot daughter making paillasses at 1d. each. Here is a woman who has a sick husband and a little child to look after. She is employed at shirt-finishing at 3d. a dozen, and by the utmost effort can only earn 6d. a day, out of which she has to find her own thread. Another, with a crippled hand, maintains herself and a blind husband by match-box making, for which she is remunerated on the liberal scale mentioned above; and, out of her 24d. a gross, she has to pay a girl a penny a gross to help her. Others obtain at Covent Garden, in the season, ld. or 2d. a peck for shelling peas, or 6d. a basket for walnuts; and they do well if their labor brings them 10d. or 1s. a day. With men it is, comparatively speaking, no better. "My master," says one man visited by a recent writer in the Fortnightly Review, "gets a pound for what he gives me 38. for making.' And this it is easy to believe, when we know that for a pair of fishing boots which will be sold at three guineas the poor workman receives 58. 3d. if they are made to order, or 48. 6d. if made for stock. An old tailor and his wife are employed in making policemen's overcoats. They have to make, finish, hot-press, put on the buttons, and find their own thread, and for all this they receive 28. 10d. for each coat. This old couple work from half-past six in the morning until ten at night, and between them can just manage to make a coat in two days. Here is a mother who has taken away whatever articles of clothing she can strip from her four little children without leaving them absolutely naked. She has pawned them not for drink, but fo coals and food. A shilling is all she can procure, and with this she has bought seven pounds of coals and a loaf of bread. We might fill page after page with these dreary details, but they would become sadly monotonous, for it is the same everywhere. Professor Huxley says that in his voyage around the world and in all his studies of savage life he found no people so miserable, wretched, and degraded as those who exist in the poorer quarters of London. Further British testimony as to the degraded condition of the British laborer. Mr. Chace gave further English testimony on the condition of labor in Great Britain and Ireland as follows: Lord Salisbury, the great Tory leader of Great Britain, one of the most prominent men in England, last fall published the following: "Thousands of families have only a single room to live in. It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, or the impulses which they must give to vice. Three schools were taken and the condition of the children was For minding the children and running on errands the "strong humble girl" will receive $8 per year, or 67 cents a month. Happy land! The Glasgow Herald last month stated that there are in the city of Glasgow 45,000 families each living in a single room. These are among the worst of the pictures in Great Britain. But there are millions upon millions of people employed in her industrial pursuits who fare but little better. In Manchester, in Oldham, in Birmingham, in Bradford, where these worsted goods are made to which I have referred, if a man (or woman) leaves his work or loses his place, hundreds are ready to step in. The wages they earn are but barely sufficient to support life. Their flagging energies are kept up by constant draughts of beer. There is but one great river in England, and that is not laid down in the map. It is a river of beer, running down the throats of her people, in which they drown their sorrows. The London Times says of the agricultural laborer in England: "His condition is hopeless; once a peasant, always a peasant.' Joseph Arch said: "The agricultural laborers of England look with envy upon the beasts of burden." Comfortless condition of the laboring classes in Manchester, England. Mr. Robert Porter, late Secretary of the Tariff Commission, writes of the condition of the laboring classes in Manchester: Some of the houses had bare wooden floors, some had red brick floors, some had bare flag-stones. Hardly one had a vestige of carpet. By far the largest proportion of the operatives live from hand to mouth, generally in one room, in which a few chairs, a deal table, a bedstead, four or five cups and saucers, a few dishes and plates, a wash-tub, a sauce-pan, and a kettle comprise the chief articles of furniture. Every thing in many cases, including the sleeping and family washing, is done in the general room. An old shawl and a dirty print gown, and wooden shoes which clattter on the sidewalk, form their toilet. The wretched working people of DundeeThey live in one and two roomed "nurseries of disease." Mr. Porter writes also of the spinning and weaving districts of Dundee: The wages are not over $2.25 per week, and the best of the workingmen only live from hand to mouth and in squalid misery. In some districts the operatives live in houses totally unfit for human habitations; they are low one-story buildings with but one room on a floor and windows about two feet square. I actually found in some whole families living like animals on the bare ground, and in one the mother of a family lay dying literally of starvation! The children were poor, pinched, half-starved little creatures. I visited, says he, at least a dozen houses in this part of Dundee and found the inmates almost all in the same state of misery and want. In one district alone 50,000 operatives were receiving alms annually. They lived principally on bread. The American consul at Dundee, Mr. Wells, in his report to the State Department of November, 1883, writes: The average wages of the working people in this town is for skilled artisans $6.87 per week of 54 hours' work in the case of ironworkers, and 51 hours for tradesmen connected with house-building. Laborers get $4.75 per week of 57 hours. There are workmen |