‘Pardon the liberty I am taking, but having read what you said about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case. I am a tie-maker who, after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn’t earned a penny for more than ten years.’
Curiosity led me to that room, and though I had some difficulty in squeezing myself into it, I was very soon glad to get out of it. There he lay on a miserable bed, by no means clean. I had to sit on the side of that bed, and I felt uneasy. It was partially covered with ties or silk for making them, and he lay there with his decaying lungs, every few minutes his cough troubling him. I did not stay long, but long enough to see his wife three times put down her work to raise his head that he might with difficulty expectorate.
‘I see you are going to help Women Home Workers. I have begged two shillings from poor friends, and send it to you, for my wife is one of them. I have been ill for two years, and as I watch my wife at her work night and day, and know how little she gets for it, I feel more than I can tell.’
No address was given, so I never saw the room, but the fact remains that for two years he had lain there ill, while ‘home work’ was continually around him.
I have been in rooms and seen sometimes sick or dying children, sometimes a dead child, where clothing for other children was being made night and day; I have breathed, or, rather, swallowed, the close, heavy, sickening atmosphere, and come away feeling faint, but wondering into what homes the garments being made would go, and how the children would fare that wore them. Ay, I thought, too, of the old words, ‘Rachel weeping for her children because they are not.’ The bodies of the poor folk who are engaged in these ‘home industries’ are of necessity but poor bodies, so frightfully ill-nourished that they fall an easy prey to all kinds of disease--not only to chest complaints and fevers, but to all forms of disease; skin diseases especially abound. The ill-nourished and sickly plant develops parasites; the ill-nourished human does precisely the same. The weaker the animal life, the more it becomes the prey of the myriads of relentless foes, seen and unseen, that are greedily waiting for it; while filthy air and water, vile rooms and insanitary accommodation, dirty bodies, endless work, and hopeless apathy all combine to make Home Workers a danger to the community.
