ety bodies bequeath to their country? "But
they occupy so little room in the factory, and each of them brings me in
sixpence net every day," will say the employer.

In an immense London factory we saw girls, bald at seventeen from
carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another, when
the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables. But "It
costs so little, the work of women who have no special trade! Why should
we use a machine? When these can do no more, they will be easily
replaced, there are so many of them in the street!"

On the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a bare-footed
child asleep, with its bundle of papers in its arms ... child-labour
costs so little that it may be well employed, every evening, to sell
tenpenny-worth of papers, of which the poor boy will receive a penny, or
a penny halfpenny. And continually in all big cities you may see robust
men tramping about who have been out of work for months, while their
daughters grow pale in the overheated vapours of the workshops for
dressing stuffs, and their sons are filling blacking-pots by hand, or
spend those years during which they ought to have learned a trade, in
carrying about baskets for a greengrocer, and at the age of eighteen or
twenty become regular unemployed.

And so it is everywhere, from San Francisco to Moscow, and from Naples
to Stockholm. The waste of human energy is the distinguishing and
predominant trait of our industry, not to mention trade where it attains
still more colossal proportions.

What a sad satire is that name, Political _Economy_, given to the
science of waste and energy under the system of wagedom!

This is not all. If you speak to the director of a well-organized
factory, he will naively explain to you that it is difficult nowadays to
find a skilful, vigorous, and energetic workman, who works with a will.
"Should such a man present himself among the twenty or thirty who call
every Monday asking us for work, he is sure to be received, even if we
are reducing the number of our hands. We recognize him at the first
glance, and he is always accepted, even though we have to get rid of an
older and less active worker the next day." And the one who has just
received notice to quit, and all those who will receive it to-morrow, go
to reinforce that immense reserve-army of capital--workmen out of
work--who are only called to the loom or the bench when there is
pressure of work, or to