ndustrial movement. But the constant
contact with the factory operatives, the pressure of the great
capitalists, which is much more felt than that of the small employer to
whom the apprentice still stood in a more or less personal relation, the
influences of life in towns, and the fall of wages, have made nearly all
the handicraftsmen active participators in labour movements. We shall
soon have more to say on this point, and turn meanwhile to one section of
workers in London who deserve our attention by reason of the
extraordinary barbarity with which they are exploited by the money-greed
of the bourgeoisie. I mean the dressmakers and sewing-women.

It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles
which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie
involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers. We have
already seen this in the case of the lacemakers, and come now to the
dressmaking establishments of London for further proof. They employ a
mass of young girls--there are said to be 15,000 of them in all--who
sleep and eat on the premises, come usually from the country, and are
therefore absolutely the slaves of their employers. During the
fashionable season, which lasts some four months, working-hours, even in
the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases,
eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on at these times without any
set regulation, so that the girls never have more than six, often not
more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more than two hours in
the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to twenty hours, if
not the whole night through, as frequently happens! The only limit set
to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the needle
another minute. Cases have occurred in which these helpless creatures
did not undress during nine consecutive days and nights, and could only
rest a moment or two here and there upon a mattress, where food was
served them ready cut up in order to require the least possible time for
swallowing. In short, these unfortunate girls are kept by means of the
moral whip of the modern slave-driver, the threat of discharge, to such
long and unbroken toil as no strong man, much less a delicate girl of
fourteen to twenty years, can endure. In addition to this, the foul air
of the workroom and sleeping places, the bent posture, the often bad and
indigestible food, all these causes,