The operative's family went, some to
the factory, others to the gutter, but none to school; they were
ill-dressed, excepting on Sundays, when they obtained their clothes from
the pawnshop. As the Saturdays came round, the frying-pan in the cellar
was almost constantly at work until Monday night; and as regularly as
Thursday arrived, the bundle of clothes was sent to the pawnshop. Yet
the income of the upper-class family in the higher part of the house was
a hundred a year; and the income of the lower class family in the cellar
was fifty pounds more--that is, a hundred and fifty pounds a year!
An employer in the same neighbourhood used to say, "I cannot afford
lamb, salmon, young ducks and green peas, new potatoes, strawberries and
such-like, until after my hands have been consuming these delicacies of
the season for some three or four weeks."
The intense selfishness, thriftlessness, and folly of these highly paid
operatives, is scarcely credible. Exceptions are frequently taken to
calling the working classes "the lower orders;" but "the lower orders"
they always will be, so long as they indicate such sensual indulgence
and improvidence. In cases such as these, improvidence is not only a
great sin, and a feeder of sin, but it is a great _cruelty_. In the case
of the father of a family, who has been instrumental in bringing a
number of helpless beings into the world, it is heartless and selfish in
the highest degree to spend money on personal indulgences such as drink,
which do the parent no good, and the mother and the children, through
the hereditary bad example, an irreparable amount of mischief.
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