me for an inspector, several of them speaking at once, informed me of what was evidently their chief subject of complaint-namely, that the apartment in which they could sometimes warm themselves and snatch an hour's sleep between the day-work and the night-work was 'crowded. All of them expressed great dissatisfaction at this crowding. "There may be one hundred men, and nowhere to lie down; even under the shelves it is crowded," said dissatisfied voices. "Have a look at it yourself. It is close here." The room was certainly not large enough. In the thirty-six-foot room about forty men might find place to lie down on the shelves. Some of the men entered the room with me, and they vied with each other in complaining of the scantiness of the accommodation. "Even under the shelves there is nowhere to lie down," said they. These men, who in twenty degrees of frost, without overcoats, carry on their backs twentystone loads during thirty-six hours; who dine and sup not when they need food, but when their overseer allows them to eat; living altogether in conditions far worse than those of dray-horses, it seemed strange that these people only complained of insufficient accommodation in the room where they warm themselves. But though this seemed to me strange at first, yet, entering further into their position, I understood what a feeling of torture these men, who never get enough sleep, and who are half-frozen, must experience when, instead of resting and being warmed, they have to creep on the dirty floor under the shelves, and there, in the stuffy and vitiated air, become yet weaker and more broken down. Only, perhaps, in that miserable hour of vain attempt to get rest and sleep do they painfully realise all the horror of their life-destroying thirty-seven-hour work, and that is why they are specially agitated by such an apparently insignificant circumstance as the overcrowding of their room. Having watched several gangs at work, and having talked with some more of the men and heard the same story from them all, I drove home, having convinced myself that what my acquaintance had told me was true. It was true that for money, only enough to subsist on, people considering themselves free men thought it necessary to give themselves up to work such as, in the days of serfdom, not one slave owner, however cruel, would have sent his slaves to. Let alone slave owners, not one cab proprietor would send his horses to such work, for horses cost money, and it would be wasteful, by excessive, thirty-seven-hour work, to shorten the life of an animal of value. |