Note 155 — Chapter III

It is evident that the same thing is true of all the countries where capitalism reigns. Here is what Faucher, for example, says in his “Études sur l’Angleterre”: “Work with the needle is so poorly paid in London that the young persons who give themselves up to it earn only three or four shillings a week, working sixteen or eighteen hours a day. The wages of a fancy needle worker, for a hard day, are from 50 to 60 centimes, while linen workers generally get 30 centimes for stitching a shirt. Nothing more frightful could be imagined than the existence of these poor girls. They must get up at four or five o’clock in the morning, at all seasons of the year, to go to work, or to receive the orders of the merchants. They work without relaxation until midnight in small rooms, where they are crowded together by fives and sixes for economy in the use of fuel and light. If they are admitted to a dressmaker’s or linen draper’s establishment, they are ill-fed, and under pretext of pressure of business are kept at their task day and night, with only four or five hours of sleep, which are further regularly limited on Saturday. This sedentary life and constant confinement ages them before their time, when phthisis spares them. Is it to be wondered at if some, frightened and disheartened at finding the way of virtue so hard, hold out their arms to prostitution?”155