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Updated: June 25, 2025
If the sewing-women, teachers, servants, and washer-women could once be collected over against the thread-mill, then some inferences could be drawn which would be worth something. Then some light might be thrown upon the obstinate fallacy of "creating an industry," and we might begin to understand the difference between wanting thread and wanting a thread-mill.
Just below the Baths of the Louvre, there are several floating barges belonging to the washer-women, anchored at the foot of the great stone staircase leading down to the water. They stand there day after day, beating their clothes upon flat boards and rinsing them in the Seine.
Unless he wished to reclimb the wall and he did not he must go by the terrace, which retreat was cut off by the washer-women, or by the parapet, already occupied by the girl in white and the washing. He turned abruptly and his elbow brushed a stocking to the ground. He stooped to pick it up and then he blushed still a shade deeper. 'This is washing day, observed the girl with a note of apology.
The men looked shabby, and the uniforms were as varied as a carnival, though by no means so gay. Whenever they crossed a stream, which was not seldom, groups of men were standing in the water to their middle, washing their clothing, very much as Olympia had seen the washer-women on the Continent, in Europe.
Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away lodgings, where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those who came to take children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust scolding mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion small dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the way to Heaven.
"Mademoiselle, I make no apologies. Buttons will come off, and stockings will contract holes. Washer-women are heartless. The mountain will not come to Mahomet: therefore I darn 'em myself." "A philosopher under all circumstances. And pray what have you done with your pupil in morality and economy?" "Oh, Dupleisis?
But if it be true that the thread-mill would not exist but for the tax, or that the operatives would not get such good wages but for the tax, then how can we form a judgment as to whether the protective system is wise or not unless we call to mind all the seamstresses, washer-women, servants, factory-hands, saleswomen, teachers, and laborers' wives and daughters, scattered in the garrets and tenements of great cities and in cottages all over the country, who are paying the tax which keeps the mill going and pays the extra wages?
I mean solid sound slavery on which the Greek and the Roman world rested. FAR finer worlds than ours, my dear chap! Oh FAR finer! And can't be done without slavery. Simply can't be done. Oh, they'll all come to realise it, when they've had a bit more of this democratic washer-women business." Levison was laughing, with a slight sneer down his nose.
Below us the tiny place slumbered in the sunshine; scarcely a sign of life save specks of washer-women on the beach bending over white patches which we knew were linen spread out to dry. The ebb-tide lapped lazily on the shingle, where the sea changed suddenly from ultramarine to a fringe of feathery white. A white sail or two flecked the blue of the bay.
The poor slaves of washer-women and working men's wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband was the only "respectable" condition, couldn't understand for the life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so cheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and goes about in the parish like a district visitor!"
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