The Government were not, however, the only offenders whose parsimony excited Punch's indignation. In 1878, when the wages of the railwaymen on the Midland were reduced, he prophesied increased inefficiency and more accidents. Railway servants were, in his opinion, overworked and underpaid. Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1890, Major Marindin, in his report on the collision at Eastleigh, found that an engine-driver and stoker had failed to keep a proper look-out, but noted that they had been on duty for sixteen and a half hours. Punch's comment took the form of the cartoon of "Death and his brother Sleep" on the engine. The overloaded country postman had excited Punch's compassion in 1885, and in the same year the outrageously long hours—sixteen a day and seven days a week—imposed on tram drivers and conductors had come in for severe censure in an article which also mentions the sweating of East End tailors' apprentices. It was this scandal, and the campaign which it provoked, that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission with Lord Dunraven as Chairman. Punch joined in the controversy with a whole series of articles, cartoons, and verses. His first contribution was headed with a picture of a fat fur-coated contractor raking sovereigns out of the "sweating furnace," and took for its text Lord Dunraven's statement that "as regards hours of labour, earnings, and sanitary surroundings, the condition of these workers is more deplorable than that of any body of working men in any portion of the civilized or uncivilized world." A set of ironical advertisements followed of clothes made by sweated labour, including "The Happy Duchess Jacket—straight from a fever-stricken home," and "The Churchyard Overcoat," the product of slave-labour in the East End. Then we have "The modern Venus attired by the Three Dis-Graces"—a stalwart fashionable lady waited on by three starveling sempstresses; a mock Ode on the Triumph of Capital, full of ironic eulogy of Mammon; and, most remarkable of all, a long sardonic poem, published in September, 1888, under the heading, "Israel and Egypt; or Turning the Tables," which is at once an indictment of, and an apology for, the Jew Sweaters.
Punch prefaces the poem with two extracts:—
"The Children of Israel multiplied so as to excite the jealous fears of the Egyptians.... They were therefore organized into gangs under taskmasters, as we see in the vivid pictures of the monuments, to work upon the public edifices. 'And the Egyptians made the Children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field.'"—Smith's Ancient History.
"The Sweater is probably a Jew, and, if so, he has the gift of organization, and an extraordinary power of subordinating everything—humanity, it may be, included—to the great end of getting on.... The conditions of life in East London ruin the Christian labourer, and leave the Jewish labourer unharmed."—The Spectator on Sweaters and Jews.
Jews and Gentiles
The verses compare the treatment of the Israelites under Pharaoh with the modern sweating of the Gentile by the Jew middleman:—
Yes, the Gentile once "sweated" the Jew,
But the Hebrew has now turned the tables; Dunraven will tell you that's true.
ONE EFFECT OF THE SWEATING COMMISSION
Swell (at West-End Tailor's, to the Foreman): "Ah—look here, Snipson, I've been reading all about this Sweating System, don'tcherno!—and as I find that the Things I pay you Eight Guineas for—ah—you get made by the Sweaters for about—ah—Two-and-Six—I've made up my mind—ah—to do the thing well, without screwing you down. So—ah—just take my order for a Seven-and-Sixpenny Dress Suit."