40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters, always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial charges to the verge of pauperism.”—(“Standard,” 5th April, 1866.)
As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the Paradise of the labourer because “freedom of labour,” or what is the same thing, “freedom of capital,” is there limited neither by the despotism of Trade’s Unions, nor by Factory Acts, a word or two on the “happiness” of the Belgian labourer. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated in the mysteries of this happiness than the late M. Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his work: “Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique, Bruxelles, 1855.” Here we find among other matters, a normal Belgian labourer’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates ou very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with those of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family “consists of father, mother, and four children.” Of these 6 persons “four may be usefully employed the whole year through.” It is assumed that “there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,” nor are there “expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes, except a very small sum for church sittings,” nor “contributions to savings banks or benefit societies,” nor “expenses due to luxury or the result of improvidence.” The father and eldest son, however, allow themselves “the use of tobacco,” and on Sundays “go to the cabaret,” for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned. “From a general compilation of wages allowed to the labourers in different trades, it follows that the highest average of daily wage is 1 franc 56c., for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and 55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at the maximum, to 1068 francs a-year,
