In an immense London factory you could see girls, bald at seventeen from carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another, when the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables. But…it costs so little, the work of women who have no special trade! What is the use of a machine ? When these can do no more, they will be easily replaced…there are so many in the street.
On the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a bare-footed child asleep, with its bundle of papers in its arms…child-labour costs so little that it may well be employed, every evening, to sell tenpenny-worth of papers, of which the poor boy will receive a penny, or a penny half-penny. And lastly, you may see a robust man tramping, dangling his arms; he has been out of work for months. Meanwhile his daughter grows pale in the overheated vapours of the workshop for dressing stuffs, and his son fills blacking pots by hand, or waits hours at the corner of a street till a passer-by enables him to earn a penny.
And so it is everywhere, from San Francisco to Moscow, and from Naples to Stockholm. The waste of human energy is the distinguishing and predominant trait of industry, not to mention trade where it attains still more collossal proportions.
What a sad satire is that name, Political Economy, given to the science of waste of energy under the system of wagedom!
