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If it could be made possible for the joyless toilers to come out of the sweater's den, or the stifling factory; if the seamstress could leave her needle, and the mother get away from the weary round of babydom and household drudgery for a day now and then, to the cooling, invigorating, heart-stirring influences of the sea, it should be done, even if it did cost a few paltry thousands.
There was a friend of that man Porter got turned away from our shop, because he wouldn't pay some tyrannical fine for being saucy, as they called it, to the shopman; and he went to a sweater's and then to another; and his friends have been tracking him up and down this six months, and can hear no news of him." "Aw! guide us! And what'n, think yow, be gone wi' un?"
Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim," which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the sweat-shop." It is easy to say, "Oh, well, these horrible things you are telling us about belong to the Old World!"
An English worker has generally learned the trade as a whole, and is secure of better place and pay; but a Polish Jew, a carpenter at home, goes at once into a sweater's shop, and after a few weeks has learned one branch of the trade, and is enrolled on the list of workers. For the women, however, there is a smaller proportion comparatively of foreigners.
She also had five children, the only one able to earn anything being a daughter, fourteen years of age, who works in a sweater's shop for two dollars a week. On the walls of the rooms in this building where the postal uniforms were being made, the cockroaches were crawling, and in some places were swarming as thick as ants about an anthill.
For at the honourable shops, the master deals directly with his workmen; while at the dishonourable ones, the greater part of the work, if not the whole, is let out to contractors, or middle-men "sweaters," as their victims significantly call them who, in their turn, let it out again, sometimes to the workmen, sometimes to fresh middlemen; so that out of the price paid for labour on each article, not only the workmen, but the sweater, and perhaps the sweater's sweater, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, have to draw their profit.
Ken let him in and they held a whispered consultation. "Let's see," said Reddy, picking up the sweater. "It's going to be an all-fired hard job. This sweater's tight. We'll wake him." "Not on your life!" exclaimed Ken. "Not if we're quick. Now you roll up the sweater so and stretch it on your hands so and when I lift Kel up you slip it over his head. It'll be like pie."
The Distress Committee was not the only body pretending to 'deal' with the poverty 'problem': its efforts were supplemented by all the other agencies already mentioned the Labour Yard, the Rummage Sales, the Organized Benevolence Society, and so on, to say nothing of a most benevolent scheme originated by the management of Sweater's Emporium, who announced in a letter that was published in the local Press that they were prepared to employ fifty men for one week to carry sandwich boards at one shilling and a loaf of bread per day.
Then a rush was made to Sweater's Emporium and several yards of cheap green ribbon were bought, and divided up into little pieces, which they tied into their buttonholes, and thus appropriately decorated, formed themselves into military order, four deep, and marched through all the principal streets, up and down the Grand Parade, round and round the Fountain, and finally over the hill to Windley, singing to the tune of 'Tramp, tramp, tramp, the Boys are marching': 'Vote, Vote, Vote for Adam Sweater!
But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch. The practical slavery to which the laboring-people, by the sweating system, have been degraded, is illustrated on almost every page of the evidence. One witness testifies: "They do almost as they like with their victims. The people are afraid to give evidence against them.
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