AN AMERICAN VIEW OF LIFE IN LONDON. SMALL EARNINGS OF WAGEWORKERS. The High Cost of Food.—A Cheerful Struggle for Existence. [From the " San Francisco Chronicle"] London, September 29, 1884.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 83, 3 January 1885, Page 5

AN AMERICAN VIEW OF LIFE IN LONDON. SMALL EARNINGS OF WAGEWORKERS. The High Cost of Food.— A Cheerful Struggle for Existence. [From the " San Francisco Chronicle"] London, September 29, 1884.

During the years that I resided in the United States, years that I shall always count as having been among the happiest of my life, I frequently heard people grumbling about the hardness of the times, the growth of monopolies, the arrogance of the wealthy, and the usual concatenation of more or less imaginary evils that dissatisfied people all over the world are so fond of expatiating upon. No doubt there are thousands of these grumblers still strolling around in the land of freedom, and for their benefit I propose in this letter to show that every man who has to earn his living, I care not whether it be with his hands or his head, is infinitely better off to-day in America than in this country. To begin at the bottom of the ladder, and first of all deal with the question of wages, the agricultural laborer in this country is rarely found to be earning 16s. a week. I was recently spending a few days at Hastings, in Sussex, and during my stay at that fashionable watering place I took occasion to visit a small town, Win chelsea by name, boasting some 900 inhabitants. The population of the miniature town and the surrounding district is purely agricultural, and exhaustive inquiry among the farmers and hop-growers there rosidiug satisfied me that 12s. per week was a fair average of the earnings of at least twothirds of the population. Of this 125., never less and often more than 2s. goes for r«nt.

TWO DOLLAKS A WEEK. In three cases I found a man and his wife with upwards of six children, none of whom were as yet able to earn anything, subsisting upon 10s per week. Now, ye grumblers, just reflect for a moment. How would you feed and clothe yourselves, much less your wives and families, on 10s per week ? In this Bame tiny town there are two butcher's shops, and I found the prices of meat to be as follows; — Prime parts of beef, Is per f pound ; inferior parts, lOd per pound ; cuttings, that is to say, odd bits chopped off here and there to render the prime joints more sightly, 7d per pound. A loaf of bread weighing four pounds costs 6d ; vegetables are a trifle cheaper than in America, and bacon and ham are each about 4d a pound dearer. Now, then, how on earth do those unhappy people keep body and soul together? I am bound to confess that the conversation I had with several of them left the impression on my mind that they were tolerably well satisfied with their surroundings. Sometimes they got a little meat. "Once a week?'' I queried. "Oh, no; not once a week. Perhaps, take it all the year round, once in three weeks." Bread and cheese appear to be their staple food, and on Sundays a slice or two of bacon graces the anything but festive board. Almost without exception these poor hinds are regular attendants at the grand old church standing in the middle of the town, and 1 can vouch, from personal experience, that they raise their voices in thanks to the Almighty for the benefits they enjoy in far less uncertain tones than their wealthier brethren, the farmers, hop growers, and few private gentlemen who honour Winchelsee by making it their dwelling-place.

SKILLED LABOUR. Now let us see how skilled labour is rewarded in this great country. A good carpenter, a thorough master of his trade, is exceptionally fortunate if he can make 48s a week, and for this amount he will have to put in an honest ten hours' work a day. As a matter of fact, two-thirds of the carpenters in this country do not earn 32s a i week, while, » bricklayer who makes 34s a

week is envied by his fellow-labourers. A man who drives a team and works from six o'clock in the morning until eight at night is considered as doing fairly well if his weekly wage amounts to 30s. Puddlera, who face the blazing furnace for hours at a stretch, in some few instances make as much as £3 per week, but theie are very few works in England that are at present running at full time. Leaving the ruder form of manual labour, let us glance for a moment at the earnings of skilled artisans. A pianoforte maker who kuows every branch of his trade, cannot make more than £3 a week in the best pianoforte manufactory in England. As for cabinet-making, the enormous influx of Germans into this country during the past few years has brought wages down to such an extent that unless a man is a skilled designer or maker of artistic furniture he cannot hope to make more than £2 a week.

JEWELLERS AND CLERKS. Watches are now made almost entirely by machinery, and as they can be imported at a less cost than they can be manufactured at home, this branch of trade brings but a poor pittance— say some 32s or 36s a week to the skilled mechanic. Of course there are exceptional men who can command much over that sum, but the demand for the chronometer, with its split seconds, fly-back action, and the various improvements that are to be found in a watch costing from £40 to £100, is very limited. The working jeweller, too, whose specialty is the finishing of rings, chains, and other articles of personal adornment, owing to the fact that machinery to-day plays an I all - important part in the manufacture of such articles, now finds his occupation gone, and a man in this line must be wonderfully skilled to make from 48s to £3 a week. Turning to the occupations open to men of some Tittle education, even a still more deplorable state of things is found to exist. There are thousands of clerks, expert book-keepers, writing a good hand and perfectly able to correspond, working to-day in London offices for £1 a week. In banks clerks usually begin at a salary of £30 a year. If they hold their position and give satisfaction to their employers, at the end of five years they will probably find themselves in receipt of £80 a year, and I am personally acquainted with several banking clerks to-day, who have been twenty years in their present situation, whose salary does not exceed £300 a year.

WAGES OF SALESMEN. Salesmen in stores too are miserably paid, 325. a week being considered nowadays a fair salary. Of course there are men in London employed as clerks and salesmen who are well paid and whose salaries in some, but very few instances, run up as high as £5 or £6 a week. It is only, however, when the employe* has been many years in his situation, or when he proves to be an exceptionally clever salesman, that he can hope to obtain any such salary as the above, before he has put in something like 20 years' service. The cause of this deplorable state of things is not far to seek. First of all, there are far more people in London than there are positions for. Any one who doubts this should pay a visit to any of the London docks at 7 o'clock in the morning, where he will find hundreds of men patiently waiting in the hope that they may get a day's work at hard manual labour in loading and unloading vessels for the handsome remuneration of 4s. During the same ten hours, less twenty minutes (the time allowed for dinner), the hardest sort of work has to be performed, and yet among- the applicants from j day to day may be found hunderds of edu- | cated men perfectly well qualified to fill the position of clerks, bookkeepers and salesmen. Secondly, there has been an enormous influx of fairly educated young Germans into England during the past few years seeking positions in commercial houses. These young men make excellent clerks and are uniformly steady, and are willing to work for a sum at which the average Englishman turns up his nose, and as they are also able to correspond in their own language as well as in English, one finds the German element strongly represented in almost all large London counting-houses.

THE COST OF FOOD. Now as to what it costs the class of people I have been referring to to live in London. A seven-roomed house within three miles of the heart of the city may be had for from £30 to £40 a year, and the rates and taxes of such a dwelling will amount to another £10 or £12. It is possible to obtain a house of about the same size in the outskirts of London, say six miles from the Genera} Postoffice, for from £20 to £25 a year, but as the railway companies offer but small concessions to regular travellers the cost of the daily journey to and from th city makes it even more expensive living in the suburbs. Meat is terribly dear in London, the best joints of beef and mutton being Is a pound, the best steak Is 3d a pound, chops the same price, while no meat really fit to eat can be bought under 9d. Although London is perhaps better served with fish of all kinds than any other city in the world, yet this wholesome and highly nutritious kind of food is little in favour with th© middle class. The fact is the English people have no idea how to cook fish, and soles, turbot, brill and other kinds of choice fish, as served on the tables of persons of moderate means, are usually simply a jumbled-up mess, appetising neither in taste nor appearance. Tea, which is consumed here in huge quantities by all classes, has during the last few years greatly deteriorated in quality, although it is not lower in price. A really good tea cannot now be bought for less than 3s 4d a pound, and the horrible mixture brewing a liquor nearly black, and tasting more like a decoction of senna than the product of China or Japan, which is retailed at 2s a pouud, is the staple drink of the middle class.

GOOD CLOTHES NOT CIIEAP. A great deal has been said and written about the cheapness of clothes in this country, and it is certainly true that one can have a suit of good-looking tweed made to order for as little as £2 10s. But there is little or no wear in the stuff, -which is what is known in the trade as shoddy, and I can state from personal experience that a man can get a suit of clothes made in Philadelphia for £3 which will do him more service and fit him a great deal better than the articles I have just referred to. Transportation in London, too, is much dearer than in American cities. There are now a good many horse-car lines in London, but as there is no transfer system, no issue of exchange tickets, to cover a distance of four miles one has often to take two or three diffefent cars, at an aggregate cost of 6d. Bread in London costs 6d for a four-pound loaf. Real butter is only to be obtained at an almost prohibitive price, but a filthy substitute, the resultant of an admixture of imported butter and grease, of some sort or other, is freely sold at from Is to Is 4d a pound. Boots and shoes are oheaper than in America, but of late years the quality of these necessary artioles has greatly deteriorated. Fourfifths of the population, I should say, wear ready-made shoes, which are turned out at the factories at Northampton in enormous quantities. The wages paid at this, the great centre of the boot trade, are miserable, hundreds of men working for from 21s

to 32s a week, and, as a natural consequence, the miserable materials are little more than stuck together, and a few wet "days are fatal to these fraudulent understandings.

PERTINENT PACTS. What I have said about London applies equally to all parts of England; but of course even lower rates of pay prevail in the smaller cities and the towns and ivillages throughout the country. The only people that appear to me to be well paid for their labour are civil servants, lawyers, and clergymen of the Church of England. Until quite recently servants of the Crown have been selected almost exclusively from, the family connections, of the aristocracy, and even now, when success in competitive examinations is supposed to be the only method of obtaining those much-sought-after positions, one has only to study the Civil List to see that, as of yore, nearly all the most valuable positions are filled by the hangers-on of the upper ten thousand. With regard to the law, both barristers and. solicitors appear to be licensed to rob their unfortunate clients to any extent, while the amount of money annually wrung from the people to support the Established Church is still a standing disgrace to a presumably free country. A very different state of things, by the bye, prevails among the Nonconformists. There are no dissenting ministers in England to-day who draw the salaries approaching in value those enjoyed by Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Talmage, or other eminent divines on your side of the Atlantic. The Wesleyans, or Methodists, are probably the wealthiest and most numerous of the Nonconformist bodies in this country, yet I am safe in saying that there is not one of their ministers who enjoys a salary of £500 a year. Half that sum is considered a liberal salary, and there are hundreds of them who do not get more than £150 and a house to live in.

HEARTLESS CORPOBATIONS. The servants of the great railway corporations are wretchedly paid, and further, the companies make no provision for their old servants. When worn out with long years of service they have to make way for y onnger men. A case came under my own notice only the other day of a sta-tion-master of a minor London depot, who, having been thirty years in the company's employ, retires of necessity in the course of a few months, owing to age and infirmity. This man, who has been in charge of a depot for nearly twenty years now, enjoys the magnificent salary of £3 10s a week, and when ho leaves the company will not make him a present of a single dollar ; ueither will they take any further interest in his welfare. Railway porters get about 24s a week, guards from 32s to £2. The engineers are paid a trifle better, some getting as much as £3 a week, for which they are on duty from twelve to fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. I think I have said enough to show that any man who is able and willing to work is infinitely better off in America than in this country. lam satisfied from what I have seen in the United States that a sober industrious man, possessed of ability in any trade or profession, who assiduously applies himself to his life-work and practices ecconomy in even a moderate degree, may find himself in o position to enter into business on his own account before he is 40 years of age. In this country I know that nothing but fortuitous circumstances, independent of the man's own worth and exertions, can bring about a like result. How the unfortunate people, whose earnings I have endeavoured to give some idea of, feed and clothe their families and put them out in the world on this side of the water is a problem that I cannot pretend to solve.