e and cowheel are regarded as dainties,
and there is the whole range of mysterious English preparations of
questionable meat, from sausage and polonies to saveloys and cheap pies.
Soup can be had, pea or eel, at two or three pence a pint, and beer, an
essential to most of them, is "threepence a pot [quart] in your own
jugs." A savory dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, and the
English worker fares better in this respect than the American, for whom
there is much less provision in the way of cheap food and cook-shops. In
fact the last are almost unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no
means taking their place. Even with bread and tea alone, there is a good
deal more nourishment, since English bread is never allowed to rise to
the over-lightness which appears an essential to the American buyer. The
law with English breads and cakes of whatever nature appears to be to
work in all the flour the dough can hold, and pudding must be a slab,
and bread compact and dense to satisfy the English palate. Dripping is
the substitute for butter, and the children eat the slice of bread and
dripping contentedly. Fat of any sort is in demand, the piercing rawness
of an English winter seeming to call for heating food no less than that
of the Esquimaux for its rations of blubber and tallow. But the majority
of the women leave dripping for the children, and if a scrap of butter
cannot be had, rest contented with bread and tea, and an occasional pint
of beer. For workingwomen as a class, however, there is much less
indulgence in this than is supposed. To the men it is as essential as
the daily meals, and the women regard it in the same way. "We do well
enough with our tea, but a man must have his pint," they say; and this
principle is applied to the children, the girls standing by while the
boys take their turn at the "pot of mild."

This for the best order of workers. Below this line are all grades of
indulgence ending with the woman who earns just enough for the measure
of gin that will give her a day or an hour of unconsciousness and
freedom from any human claim. But the pressure of numbers and of
competing workers compels soberness, the steadiest and most capable
being barely able to secure subsistence, while below them is every
conceivable phase of want and struggle, more sharply defined and with
less possibility of remedy than anything found in the approximate
conditions on American soil.

CHAPTER XI.

LONDON SHO