and
then they get 10 pf. for making a blouse. A lady who spends her life
in working amongst poor people told me that many of them worked for
nothing in reality, because the trifle they earned only just paid the
difference between the food they had to buy ready cooked and the food
they might with more leisure prepare at home. They pay high rents for
wretched homes, L15, for instance, for a kitchen and one room in a
dark courtyard. Under L13 it is impossible to get anything in the
poorest quarter of Berlin.

"The house itself looked respectable enough from outside," says Frau
Buchholz, when she went to see a girl who had just married a poor man;
"but oh! those steep narrow stairs that I had to mount, those wretched
entrances on each floor, the miserable door handles, the sickly
bluish-grey walls, the shaky banisters! It was easy to see that the
outside had been devised with a view to investors, and the inside for
poverty." In houses of this class there are often three courtyards,
one behind each other, all noisy and badly kept. The conditions of
life in such circumstances are no better than in our own notorious
slums, but a slum seven storeys high, and presenting a decent front to
the world, does not suggest the real misery behind its regular row of
windows, nor does the quiet well-swept street give any picture of the
rabbit warren in the courtyards at the back. In the enormous
"confection" trade of Berlin the home-workers are nearly all widows
and mothers of families, as the unmarried girls prefer to go to
factories. A skilled hand can earn a fair wage at certain seasons of
the year, as the demand for skilled work in this department always
exceeds the supply. But the average wage of the unskilled worker is
only 10 marks a week, while it sinks as low as 4 marks for petticoats,
aprons, and woollen goods. A corset maker, who has learned her trade,
can only make from 8 to 10 marks a week in a factory, while a woman
who sits at home and covers umbrellas gets 1 mark 50 pf. _a dozen_
when the coverings are of stuff, and slightly more when they are of
silk. The extreme poverty of these home-workers is a constant subject
of inquiry and legislation, but for various reasons it is most
difficult to combat. The market is always over-crowded, because, badly
paid as it is, the work is popular. Women push into it from the middle
classes for the sake of pocket-money, and from the agrarian classes
because they fancy a city life. Efforts