The hospitals are full of accidents from these causes; often the negligence is that of a fellow-workman, but in at least half a dozen cases I have investigated not one shilling of compensation has the victim obtained.
Saw-mills, and places where steam and circular saws are used, employ a large number of boys. If you were to give a tea-party to saw-mill boys, the thing that would astonish you would be the difficulty of finding half a dozen of your guests with the proper number of fingers.
I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the planks which have been pushed through the machine by men, and he has one hand now on which only the thumb is left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which is another industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods. The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are almost of daily occurrence. The bottlers are obliged to wear masks to protect their faces, but their hands are bound to be exposed to the danger.
These are a few of the dangerous and unhealthy occupations by which the poor live, and I have enumerated those largely practised by children. I have done so to show how little we can wonder if for lack of a protecting arm, or that parental love which is, alas! so rare a thing in the very poor districts, these boys and girls yield to the first temptation to go wrong, and instead of risking life and limb for a paltry wage, take to those paths of vice which we have it on the highest authority are always the most easy of access.
As we leave the home of the factory girls we come upon a scene which illustrates the life outside. A big crowd of foul-mouthed, blackguardly boys and girls, with a few men and women among them, are gathered round two girls who are fighting fiercely. They have quarrelled, a bystander tells us, in the adjacent public-house about a young man. He is considered her legitimate property by one lady, and the said lady has surprised him treating her rival to gin. Neither of the girls is more than seventeen, I should say, yet they are fighting and blaspheming and using words that make even myself and my collaborator shudder, used as we are by this time to the defiled Saxon of the slums.
'Go it, Sal!' yells a female friend, and Sal goes it, and the boys and girls stand round and enjoy the spectacle, and add their chorus of blasphemy and indecency to the quarrel duet of the Madame Angots of the gutter.
I had nearly forgotten an incident which occurred when we were in the factory-girls' home, and which is not without its lesson as showing the value even these girls attach to social position. One young lady was introduced to us as having a sweetheart who always brought her home of an evening with great punctuality. 'What is your sweetheart?' I asked. 'A boot-finisher,' was the answer. 'Where does he work—at what firm?' 'He works just by Fenchurch Street Station.' 'Is it a large bootmaker's?' 'Well, it ain't exactly a bootmaker's; he's a shoeblack.' I never heard a shoeblack called a boot-finisher before, but I think the euphemism was allowable in a young lady who wished to exalt the commercial status of her intended.
I alluded in a recent chapter to the costermongers as a large and worthy class. Since that chapter was written I have explored a district which is almost exclusively inhabited by them—a portion of St. Luke's. To what I have already written let me add that until now I had not the slightest conception that things were so bad as they really are. My visit was early in the morning, before the men and women had gone out with their loads. If you could have seen the condition of the rooms and yards piled up with rotting vegetable refuse, and the way in which the cabbages and the fruit were stowed for the night, and where they were stowed, it would have cured such among you as are fond of a bargain at the door from ever patronising a barrow again.
Out of the fetid one room where man and wife and family slept they carried the stuff that then neighbours were to eat. It had passed the night with them, and the green-stuff was decidedly faded and languid. It was piled on the barrow, and then soused with dirty water, and so wheeled away to be cried up and down the streets of London.
No wonder diseases are spread if from such poisoned, fever-breeding dens as this the food is carried with all its impurity day after day to be hawked from door to door!