the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched
by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of
men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grin
ning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with
every step they took and each breath they drew.
And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty,
with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist
and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss
plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of
fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and
sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat upon the
pavement with their backs against a railing and
watched it all.

The unfit and the unneeded ! Industry does not
clamor for them. There are no jobs going begging
through lack of men and women. The dockers
crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn
away when the foreman does not give them a call.
The engineers who have work pay six shillings a
week to their brother engineers who can find noth
ing to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolu
tion condemning the employment of children under
fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to
toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a
day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman crawls to
muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen
Hughes Hunt prefers Regent s Canal to Islington
Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his

[[287]]

p286 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p287w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p288

v?