e could not finish the task. He had
never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he said. The
magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven days' hard
labour.

Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the accident, the
thing happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father, and
bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living on
the ticklish security of twenty shillings per week--and there are
hundreds of thousands of such families in London. Perforce, to even half
exist, they must live up to the last penny of it, so that a week's wages
(one pound) is all that stands between this family and pauperism or
starvation. The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what then?
A mother with three children can do little or nothing. Either she must
hand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be
free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-
shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale of
wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children
can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay and
death end their suffering.

To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-

A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four gross.
Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d. for glue, and
1d. for string, so that all they earned between them was 1s. 9d., or a
daily wage each of 10.5d.

In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-hat
maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the price she
obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each. For that price she had to
provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."

Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done no
wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned. The thing
happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-winner, was struck
down.