PAUPER LABOR IN ENGLAND.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1144, 4 September 1883, Page 3

PAUPER LABOR IN ENGLAND.

There is no more wretchedly remunerated employment in the Kingdom than nail-making, or one that, in consequence of the starvation prices paid, is more frequently interrupted by strikes. It spares nobody ; mites of children out of school hours pan, in their small way, assist, and the poverty of their parents makes them glad to Avail themselves of their puny help ; delicate girls, mothers who are nursing their babies, aged women, bent and feeble, and who all their lives have been, in a manner of speaking, chained to the forge drudgery in the midst of smut and smoke, still go on hammering and filing and tugging at the bellows until (heir strength utterly fails them. Then they retire for a brief spell to the workhouse, and thence to the churchyard. It is a marvel how on the scanty wages they are enabled to earn they contrive to exist at all, I remember a poor sou i at Cradley, a widow woman, who, with the assistance of her eldest daughter, a girl of thirteen, maintained by her chain-making the entire family, seven, in number. The hovel in which her 1 forge was fixed, adjoined the squalid little two-roomed cottage where she was supposed to reside, but, to use her own words, she ‘ might, except for sleeping purposes, as well almost be without it, since it was only on Sundays that she did not live with the children in the smithy.’ And never did I set eyes on more deplorable little objects than the latter were. Not one of them, including the girl who attended to the fire and the bellows, wore either shoes or stockings, though no shoe-leather could have been blacker than their feet, the remainder of their bodies being only a few shades lighter in complexion, It was a mere waste of soap, their mother averred, even if she had money to spare for its purchase, to attempt to keep them clean. Being next to naked, they could not go into the street, and their only play place was among the coal-slack and ashes. On Sunday, however, she gave them ‘ a reg’ler good scrubbing,’ and on the same day of rest she washed their rags while they remained in bed, and dried them somehow, so tint they might wear them again on Monday morning. She told me that, working at the forge from six in the morning until ten or eleven o’cloek at night, and with her daughter’s assistance, she was able to earn about five farthings an hour, or one and eightpence or ninepence a day. Ten shillings a week exceeded the average, and out of this she has to pay two and ninepence rent for the cottage and the * hearth,’ or smithy hovel. —London Telegraph.