light and ventilation; because employment becomes more and more irregular; and, finally, because in
these the last resorts of the masses made "redundant" by Modern Industry and Agriculture, competition
for work attains its maximum. Economy in the means of production, first systematically carried out in
the factory system, and there, from the very beginning, coincident with the most reckless squandering of
labour-power, and robbery of the conditions normally requisite for labour — this economy now shows
its antagonistic and murderous side more and more in a given branch of industry, the less the social
productive power of labour and the technical basis for a combination of processes are developed in that
branch.
C. Modern Manufacture
I now proceed, by a few examples, to illustrate the principles laid down above. As a matter of fact, the
reader is already familiar with numerous instances given in the chapter on the working-day. In the hardware
manufactures of Birmingham and the neighbourhood, there are employed, mostly in very heavy work,
30,000 children and young persons, besides 10,000 women. There they are to be seen in the unwholesome
brass-foundries, button factories, enamelling, galvanising, and lackering works.171 Owing to the excessive
labour of their workpeople, both adult and non-adult, certain London houses where newspapers and
books are printed, have got the ill-omened name of "slaughterhouses."172 Similar excesses are practised
in book-binding, where the victims are chiefly women, girls, and children; young persons have to do heavy
work in rope-walks and night-work in salt mines, candle manufactories, and chemical works; young people
are worked to death at turning the looms in silk weaving, when it is not carried on by machinery.173 One
of the most shameful, the most dirty, and the worst paid kinds of labour, and one on which women and
young girls are by preference employed, is the sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain, apart
from its own immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world. They flow in
from Japan, from the most remote States of South America, and from the Canary Islands. But the chief
sources of their supply are Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium, and Holland. They
are used for manure, for making bedflocks, for shoddy, and they serve as the raw material of paper.
The rag-sorters are the medium for the spread of small-pox and other infectious diseases, and they
themselves are the first victims.174 A classical example of over-work, of hard and inappropriate labour,
and of its brutalising effects on the workman from his childhood upwards, is afforded not only by coal-
mining and miners generally, but also by tile and brick making, in which industry the recently invented
machinery is, in England, used only here and there. Between May and September the work lasts from
5 in the morning till 8 in the evening, and where the drying is done in the open air, it often lasts from 4
in the morning till 9 in the evening. Work from 5 in the morning till 7 in the evening is considered "reduced"
and "moderate." Both boys and girls of 6 and even of 4 years of age are employed. They work
for the same number of hours, often longer, than the adults. The work is hard and the summer heat
increases the exhaustion. In a certain tile-field at Mosley, e.g., a young woman, 24 years of age, was in
the habit of making 2,000 tiles a day, with the assistance of 2 little girls, who carried the clay for her, and
stacked the tiles. These girls carried daily 10 tons up the slippery sides of the clay pits, from a depth of
30 feet, and then for a distance of 210 feet. "It is impossible for a child to pass through the purgatory
of a tile-field without great moral degradation... the low language, which they are accustomed to hear
from their tenderest years, the filthy, indecent, and shameless habits, amidst which, unknowing, and
half wild, they grow up, make them in after-life lawless, abandoned, dissolute.... A frightful source of
demoralisation is the mode of living. Each moulder, who is always a skilled labourer, and the chief of
a group, supplies his 7 subordinates with board and lodging in his cottages Whether members of his
family or not, the men, boys, and girls all sleep in the cottage, which contains generally two, exceptionally
3 rooms, all on the ground floor, and badly ventilated. These people are so exhausted after the day's
hard work, that neither the rules of health, of cleanliness, nor of decency are in the least observed. Many
of these cottages are models of untidiness, dirt, and dust.... The greatest evil of the system that employs
young girls on this sort of work, consists in this, that, as a rule, it chains them fast from childhood for
the whole of their after-life to the most abandoned rabble. They become rough, foul-mouthed boys,
before Nature has taught them that they are women. Clothed in a few dirty rags, the legs naked far
above the knees, hair and face besmeared with dirt, they learn to treat all feelings of decency and of
shame with contempt. During meal-times they lie at full length in the fields, or watch the boys bathing
