There s where your cheap labor of Whitechapel
comes in. They re unskilled, and have no unions,
and cut each other s throats, and ours in the bar
gain, if we don t belong to a strong union."

Without going further into the argument, this
man on the Mile End Waste pointed the moral
that when two men were after the one job wages
were bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the
matter, he would have found that even the union,
say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up
wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to
displace the union men. This is admirably in
stanced, just now, by the return and disbandment
of the soldiers from South Africa. They find
themselves, by tens of thousands, in desperate
straits in the army of the unemployed. There is
a general decline in wages throughout the land,
which, giving rise to labor disputes and strikes,
is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who
gladly pick up the tools thrown down by the
strikers.

Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed,
and great numbers of the homeless and shelterless
are inevitable when there are more men to do work
than there is work for men to do. The men and
women I have met upon the streets, and in the
spikes and pegs, are not there because as a mode
of life it may be considered a soft snap. I

[[194]]

p193 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p194w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p195

v?