for some false
movement that shall tell us she is a human and not a machine. But no,
over her shoulder to the bed on the left side, or over her shoulder to
the bed on her right side, the boxes fly, and minute by minute and hour
by hour the boxes will continue to grow till her task is completed. Then
she will put them together, tie them in dozens, and lay herself down on
that bed that contains the two children.

Need we continue? I think not, but it may give wings to imagination when
I say that in London's underworld there are at least 50,000 women whose
earnings do not exceed three halfpence per hour, and who live under
conditions similar to those described. Working, working, day and night,
when they have work to do, practically starving when work is scarce.

The people of the underworld are not squeamish, they talk freely, and as
a matter of course about life and death. Their children are at an early
age made acquainted with both mysteries; a dead child and one newly born
sometimes occupy a room with other children.

People tell me of the idleness of the underworld and there is plenty of
it; but what astonishes me is the wonderful, the persistent, but almost
unrewarded toil that is unceasingly going on, in which even infants
share.

Come again with me in the day-time, climb with me six dark and greasy
flights of stairs, for the underworld folk are sometimes located near
the sky.

In this Bastille the passages are very narrow, and our shoulders
sometimes rub the slimy moisture from the walls. On every landing in the
semi-darkness we perceive galleries running to right and to left. On the
little balconies, one on every floor, children born in this Bastille are
gasping for air through iron bars.

There are three hundred suites of box rooms in this Bastille, which
means that three hundred families live like ants in it. Let us enter No.
250. Time: 3.30 p.m. Here lives a blind matchbox-maker and his wife with
their seven children. The father has gone to take seven gross of boxes
to the factory, for the mother cannot easily climb up and down the stone
stairs of the Bastille. So she sits everlastingly at the boxes, the beds
are covered with them, the floor is covered with them, and the air is
thick with unpleasant moisture.

One, two, three, four, there they go over her shoulder to the bed or
floor; on the other side of the table sits a child of four, who, with
all the apathy of an adult if not with equal celerity, gum