that amount the wages of two-thirds the
women who earn in working London; nor are there indications that the
scale will rise or that better days are in store for one of these
toilers, patient, heavy-eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come,
and yet saying among themselves the words already given:--

"There must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be
different. Oh, yes, they must be different."

CHAPTER XIV.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS.

It is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two
countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied
by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe
that it understood the other. Not only the nation as a whole, however,
but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the
methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source
of bewilderment to the other. That conditions on both sides of the
Channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is
still unsolved for both England and the Continent, remains a truth,
though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that France
has solved one or two phases of the equation over which England is still
quite helpless.

There is a famous chapter in the history of Ireland, entitled "Snakes
in Ireland," the contents of which are as follows:--

"There are no snakes in Ireland."

On the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the
slums of Paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "There are no
slums in Paris."

In the English sense there certainly are none; and for the difference in
visible conditions, several causes are responsible. The searcher for
such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none
practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one
finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime
might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot
where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is
absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this
statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a
London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End
lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward nor inward
alleviation. Soot is king of the great city, and his prime ministers,
Smoke and Fog, work together to darken every haunt of