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Updated: May 2, 2025
For the two or three initiatory months, uncouth in speech, and vulgar in mien, with no gilded toy, rich plum-cake, or mint-new shilling to conciliate, I was despised and ridiculed; and when it was ascertained by my own confession that I was the son of a day-labourer, I was shunned by the aristocratic progeny of butchers, linen-drapers, and hatters.
The reply was, "I know you are able and willing to do as much as any man; but, do you consider that I have given you an education which cost me upwards of five hundred pounds, and have you spent ten years and a half of your life at the best schools, under the best masters whom I could procure you, only to enable you to earn twenty or thirty shillings a week as a day-labourer; have you, no higher ambition than that?"
We enter on the modern period, accordingly, with society constituted on a thoroughly authoritarian basis, the kingly power supreme and tending towards arbitrary despotism, and below the king the social hierarchy extending from the great territorial lord to the day-labourer. There is one point gained as compared to earlier forms of society.
If love were so omnipotent, so divine a thing, we should have love stories proving the truth and worth of alliances between an Earl and a kitchen-maid, between a Duchess and a day-labourer; but no attempt is made to upset conventional traditions which are tamely regarded as insuperable.
In Haggai's strong metaphor, the poor day-labourer earns his small wage and puts it into a ragged bag, or as we should say, a pocket with a hole in it; and when he comes to look for it, it is gone, and all his toil is for nothing.
It imputes evil propensities to them; it directly challenges the truth of an idea which not only have they never doubted, but which their own experience seems to them to confirm. The day-labourer really knows nothing to take the place of beer.
She wasn't pleasing to look at just a slum woman with draggled skirts, a shawl gathered tightly round her and a mildewed kind of bonnet. He was no more attractive a hulking Samson, perhaps a day-labourer, who whilst he had loved her, had probably beaten her. They had come to the hour of parting, and there they stood in the London sunshine inarticulate after life together.
In order to attain this improved efficiency the most important practical aid is piecework. This has done much even in agriculture: the turnip-hoer by the acre earns more, while he does his work at his own time with more comfort to himself than the old day-labourer.
But by his marriage he might either support or derogate from these honours. And now, having at first made a choice that was good, he had altered his mind from simple freak, captivated by a pair of bright eyes and an arch smile; and without a feeling in regard to his family, was anxious to take to his bosom the granddaughter of an American day-labourer!
Rather would I be a day-labourer in the nether-world, and among the shades of the by-gone! Fatter and fuller than ye, are forsooth the nether-worldlings! This, yea this, is bitterness to my bowels, that I can neither endure you naked nor clothed, ye present-day men!
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