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Updated: June 18, 2025
I mean that altogether, ill-paid and half-starved as they are, they consume, or waste, or have expended on them, more wealth than they produce." Mr. Booth would remove the "very poor," and plant them in industrial communities under proper government supervision.
The system was the best that could have been devised for increasing the population and aggregate wealth of the country; and even those who suffered most under it were not without pride in its results. The ill-paid workman of the last century would have thought it a poor thing to do a deliberately bad day's work.
There was also a curious interview at a big hotel with a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered with jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not think Ann Veronica would do as her companion. And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried no more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her time and energy.
Who may not consider himself ill-paid? And who is there that really thinks he is not worth more than he gets? There is no limit to the value one may put on one's own services; and he who is justified to-day in taking a quarter of a dollar, would be equally justified to-morrow in appropriating the whole concern. And then what becomes of honesty, and the right of property?
The power- loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. But this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
In Lower Canada not one-tenth of the children of the habitants could write, and only one-fifth could read. In Upper Canada the schoolmasters as a rule, according to Mrs. Anna Jameson, were "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-paid, or not paid at all." In the generality of cases they were either Scotsmen or Americans, totally unfit for the positions they filled.
The poor mother knew full well that it would be a difficulty to find anyone to take the place of the hard-worked, ill-paid governess, and the governess loved her wild charges, as indeed did everyone who knew them, and sorrowed over them in her heart, because she saw what their blind young eyes never noticed the coming shadow on the house, the gradual fading away of the weary, overtaxed mother.
While speaking of the ill-paid class of women, I must mention that the most sentimental of our occupations earns the least bread. Those who make crowns of immortelles to hang upon the tombs, only earn about sevenpence-halfpenny a day. That trade is, in very truth, funereal.
We shall hear no more of genius starving in a garret; of ill-paid or over-paid ministers of the gospel; of privileged and unprivileged sects.
An unhappy class-master must then not be too severely blamed, ill-paid as he is, and consequently not too competent, if he is occasionally unjust or out of temper. Perpetually watched by a hundred mocking eyes, and surrounded with snares, he sometimes revenges himself for his own blunders on the boys who are only too ready to detect them.
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