to work for others, have an average "expectation of
life" less by twenty years than that of the class who know the
comfortable ease of middle-class life.

It is one of these workers who said not long ago, her words being put
into the mouth of one of Mr. Besant's characters: "Ladies deliberately
shut their eyes; they won't take trouble; they won't think; they like
things about them to look smooth and comfortable; they will get things
cheap if they can. _What do they care if the cheapness is got by
starving women?_ Who is killing this girl here? Bad food and hard work.
Cheapness! What do the ladies care how many working girls are killed?"

The individual woman brought face to face with the woman dying from
overwork, would undoubtedly care. But the workers are out of sight,
hidden away in attic and basement, or the upper rooms of great
manufactories. The bargains are plain to see, every counter loaded,
every window filled. And so society, which will have its bargains, is
practically in a conspiracy against the worker. The woman who spends on
her cheapest dress the utmost sum which her working sister has for
dress, amusements, culture, and saving, preaches thrift, and it is
certain the working classes would be better off if they had learned to
save. Small wonder that the workers doubt them and their professed
friendship, and that the breach widens day by day between classes and
masses, bridged only by the work of those who, like the workers in the
Women's Provident League, know that it is to the rich that the need for
industry must be preached, not to the poor. Organization holds education
for both, and it is now quite possible to know something of the methods
of prominent firms with their workwomen, and to shun those which refuse
to consider the questions of over-time, of unsanitary workrooms, of
unjust fines and reductions, and the thousand ways of emptying some
portion of the workwoman's purse into that of the employer. It is women
who must do this, and till it is done, justice is mute, and the voice of
our sisters' blood cries aloud from the ground.

CHAPTER IX.

THE TALE OF A BARROW.

If the West End knows not the East End, save as philanthropy and Mr.
Walter Besant have compelled it, much less does it know Leather Lane, a
remnant of old London, now given over chiefly to Italians, and thus a
little more picturesquely dirty than in its primal state of pure English
grime. The eager business man hurrying dow