So to the factory she goes, though Mrs. Jones has her misgivings, and gives her strong injunctions to come straight home, which of course Sally readily promises, though whether that promise will be strictly kept is uncertain. But her four shillings are useful in the family exchequer; they are the deciding factor in Sally's life!
So on through all the succeeding years of the developing family life comes the recurring anxiety of getting her children "out." These anxieties may be considered very small, but they are as real, as important, and as grave as the anxieties that well-to-do people experience in choosing callings or professions for sons and daughters to whom they cannot leave a competency.
And all this time the family are near, so very near to the underworld. The death of Jones, half-timer as he is, would plunge them into it; and the breakdown or death of Mrs. Jones would plunge them deeper still.
What an exciting and anxious life it really is! Small wonder that many descend to the underworld when accident overtakes them. But for character, grit, patience and self-denial commend me to such women. All honour to them! may their boys do well! may their girls in days to come have less anxieties and duties than fall to the lot of working men's wives of to-day.
CHAPTER XII. IN PRISONS OFT
If every chapter in this book is ignored, I hope that this one will be read thoughtfully. For I want to show that a great national wrong, a stupidly cruel wrong, exists.
Probably all injustice is stupid, but this wrong is so foolish, that any man who thinks for one moment upon it will wonder how it came into existence.
I have written and spoken about it so often that I am almost ashamed of returning to the subject. Yet all our penal authorities, from the Home Secretary downwards, know all there is to be known about it.
I am going, then, to reiterate a serious charge! It is this: no boy from eight years of age up to sixteen, unless sound in mind and body, can find entrance into any reformatory or industrial school! No matter how often he falls into the hands of the police, or what charges may be brought against him, not even if he is friendless and homeless. Again, no youthful prisoner under twenty-one years of age, no matter how bad his record, is allowed the benefit of Borstal training unless he, too, be sound in mind and body. This is not only an enormity, but it is also a great absurdity; for it ultimately fills our prisons with weaklings, and assures the nation a continuous prison population.