"But 'ow about the wife an' kiddies?" his interlocutor demanded.

"There you are," came the answer. "How about the wife and kiddies of the
man who works cheaper than you and gets your job? Eh? How about his
wife and kiddies? He's more interested in them than in yours, and he
can't see them starve. So he cuts the price of labour and out you go.
But you mustn't blame him, poor devil. He can't help it. Wages always
come down when two men are after the same job. That's the fault of
competition, not of the man who cuts the price."

"But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was
made.

"And there you are again, right on the head. The union cheeks
competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are no
unions. There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in. They're
unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours in
the bargain, 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 instanced, 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 labour
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 have sufficiently outlined
the hardships they undergo to demonstrate that their existence is
anything but "soft."

It is a matter of sober calculation, here in England, that it is softer
to work for twenty shillings a week, and have regular food, and a bed at
night, than it is to walk the streets. The man who walks the streets
suffers more, and works harder, for far less return. I have depicte