had seen their industry brought down by reckless competition, and the manufacture of shoddy goods, to the point at which men could no longer earn enough to support their families. They had seen their wives and daughters and boys forced by want at home into workshops, where, as official inquiry has shown, health was sucked out of their bodies as though they had been the victims of vampires. They had seen the introduction and growth of the sub-contracting 'stint' system, under which boyhood and girlhood and motherhood were driven as though they had been slaves under the lash, and their earnings cut down to a penny an hour. Meanwhile, they lived in the hovels and holes of a place which can only be fitly described as one of the dirtiest ashpits of a civilisation reckless of dirt where profit is a question."
Those who want to know what horrors can exist to-day in England should read Mr. Snowden's series of articles on the subject. They are restrained in language, and state the bare facts from careful personal observation. That such things should still exist in a country claiming to be civilised would be incredible, were there not so many others of a like nature and almost as bad.
In an almost exhaustive volume on Diseases of Occupation by Sir Thomas Oliver, M.D. (1908), there is only a short reference to the hollowware trade of the "black country" near Birmingham. But
the tin plate industry of South Wales is more fully described, with the same pitiable condition of the women workers and the same terrible results to health and life. Yet nothing whatever seems to be done by the manufacturers; and though two Home Office Inspectors have fully reported on its horrors from 1888 onwards, no notice appears to have been taken of them, nor has there been any Government interference with conditions of labour which are a disgrace to civilisation.
CHAPTER X
ADULTERATION, BRIBERY, AND GAMBLING
After the terrible national crime of deadly employments it is almost an anti-climax to enumerate the vast mass of dishonesty and falsehood that pervades our commercial system in every department. Almost every fabric, whether of cotton, linen, wool, or silk, is so widely and ingeniously adulterated by the intermixture of cheaper materials that the pure article as supplied to our grandparents is hardly to be obtained. Of this one example only must serve. Calicoes have been successively dressed with such substances as paste and tallow; then with the still cheaper china clay and size; and in some cases from 50 to 90 per cent. of these latter materials have been sold as calico for exportation to countries inhabited by what we term savages. These people only found out the deception when the need for washing or exposure to tropical rains reduced the material to a flimsy and
worthless rag, as I have myself witnessed in some parts of the Malay Archipelago.[56:A]
[56:A] These facts are given in the Ninth Edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica." In recent editions the article Adulteration is limited to food and drugs. In "Chambers' Encyclopædia," cotton, linen and woollens are included among adulterated fabrics.