Sometimes Mary became so weak and exhausted through overwork, worry, and lack of proper food that she broke down altogether for the time being, and positively could not do any work at all. Then she used to lie down on the bed in her room and cry. ibid.
He would enquire into the case and lay his application before the committee at the next meeting, which was to held on the following Thursday – it was then Monday.
Linden explained to him that they were actually starving. He had been out of work for sixteen weeks. ibid.
The case had been duly considered by the committee, who had come to the conclusion that as it was a ‘chronic’ case they were unable to deal with it, and advised him to apply to the Board of Guardians. ibid.
The Guardians intimated their intention of compelling them to contribute towards the cost of their parents’ maintenance. ibid.
The house – now almost destitute of furniture and without carpets or oilcloth on the floors – was deserted and cold and silent as a tomb. On the kitchen table were a few cracked cups and saucers, a broken knife, some lead teaspoons, a part of a loaf, a small basin containing some dripping and a broken earthenware teapot with a broken spout … The floor was unswept and littered with scraps of paper and dust: in one corner was a heap of twigs and small branches of trees that Charley had found somewhere and brought home for the fire. ibid.
As she stood there with the letter in her hand – faint and weary in the midst of all this destitution, it seemed to her as if the whole world were falling to pieces and crumbling away all around her.
Owen used to wonder how they managed to continue to exist. Most of them were wearing other people’s cast-off clothes, hats, and boots, which had in some instances been given to their wives by ‘visiting-ladies’, or by the people at whose houses their wives were to work, charring. As for food, most of them lived on such credit as they could get. ibid.
Owen’s heart seemed to stop as he heard the child’s question and listened for Nora’s answer, and the question was not to be answered at all just then, for at that moment they heard someone running up the stairs and presently the door was unceremoniously thrown open and Charley Linden rushed into the house, out of breath, hatless, and crying piteously. His clothes were old and ragged; they had been patched at the knees and elbows, but the patches were tearing away from the rotting fabric into which they had been sewn. He had on a pair of stockings full of holes through which the skin was showing. The soles of his boots were worn through at one side right to the uppers … ibid.
Owen listed with contempt and anger. Here was a man who grumbled at the present state of things, yet took no trouble to think for himself and try to alter them, and who at the first chance would vote for the perpetuation of the System which produced his misery. ibid.
When the police surgeon came he pronounced the supposed drunken man to be dying from bronchitis and want of food; and further said that there was nothing to indicate that the man was addicted to drink. When the inquest was held a few days afterwards, the coroner remarked that it was the third case of death from destitution that had occurred in the town within six weeks. ibid.
Frankie also began to show the effects of being obliged to go so often without his porridge and milk; he became very pale and thin and his long hair came out in handfuls when his mother combed or brushed it. ibid.
Although privation reigned supreme in their desolate homes, where they was often neither food nor light nor fire, they were too ‘proud’ to parade their misery before each other or the world. They secretly sold or pawned their clothing and their furniture and lived in semi-starvation on the proceeds, and on credit, but they would not beg. ibid.
They never gave the ‘case’ the money. The ticket system serves three purposes. It prevents the ‘case’ abusing the ‘charity’ by spending the money on drink. It advertises the benevolence of the donors: and it enables the grocer – who is usually a member of the church – to get rid of any stale or damaged stock he may have on hand. ibid.
They humiliated, degraded and pauperised those who received them, and the existence of the societies prevented the problem being grappled with in a sane and practical manner. The people lacked the necessaries of life: the necessaries of life are produced by Work; these people were willing to work but were prevented from doing so by the idiotic system of society which these ‘charitable’ people are determined to do their best to perpetuate. ibid.
Millions of people living and dying in wretchedness and poverty in an age when science and machinery have made it possible to produce such an abundance of everything that everyone might enjoy plenty and comfort. ibid.
The procession of sandwich men was headed by the Semi-drunk and the Besotted Wretch, and each board was covered with a printed poster: ‘Great Sale of Ladies’ Blouses now Proceeding at Adam Sweater’s Emporium’. ibid.
Councillor Rushton said that several influential ratepayers and employees of labour had complained to him about the high wages of the Corporation workmen, some of whom were paid sevenpence-halfpenny an hour. ibid.
‘There was still plenty of ’em left. [laughter] So long as the workin’ class was satisfied to die orf – let ’em die orf! It was a free country. (Applause) … If they wasn’t satisfied, they would stick up for themselves!’ ibid. Councillor Grinder
Usually whenever Owen reflected upon the gross injustices and inhumanity of the existing social disorder, he became convinced that it could not possibly last; it was bound all to pieces because of its own rottenness. ibid.
And then the starving, bootless, ragged, stupid wretches fell down and worshipped the System, and offered up their children as living sacrifices upon its altars. ibid.
The festival [Easter] was the occasion of much cursing and blaspheming on the part of those whose penniless, poverty-striken condition it helped to aggravate by enforcing unprofitable idleness which they lacked the means to enjoy. ibid.
Crass then reminded the meeting that the last year’s Beano had been an unqualified success, and for his part it would be very sorry if they did not have one this year. Last year they had four brakes, and they went to Tubberton Village. ibid.
During the early part of May the weather was exceptionally bad, with bitterly cold winds … The weather had the effect of stopping nearly all outside work, and also caused a lot of illness, for those who were so fortunate as to have inside jobs frequently got wet through on their way to work in the morning and had to work all day in damp clothing, and with their boots saturated with water. ibid.
For they not only refused to help or bring about a better state of things for their children, but they ridiculed and opposed and cursed and abused those who were trying to do it for them. ibid.
As they sang the words of this noble chorus the Tories seemed to become inspired with lofty enthusiasm. It is of course impossible to say for certain, but probably as they sang there arose before their exalted imagination, a vision of the Past, and looking down the long vista of years that were gone, they saw that from their childhood they had been years of poverty and joyless toil. They saw their fathers and mothers, wearied and broken with privation and excessive labour, sinking unhonoured into the welcome oblivion of the grave. ibid.
His clothes may be ragged, his hands may be soiled
But where’s the disgrace if for bread he has toiled.
His ’art is in the right place, deny it no one can
The backbone of Old England is the honest workin’ man. ibid. ballad
But these were not free: their servile lives were spent in grovelling and cringing and toiling and running about like little dogs at the behest of their numerous masters. ibid.
The outlook for the approaching winter was – as usual – gloomy in the extreme. One of the leading daily newspapers published an article prophesying a period of severe industrial depression. ‘As the warehouses were glutted with the things produced by the working classes, there was no need for them to do any more work – at present; and so they would now have to go and starve until such time as their masters had sold or consumed the things already produced’. ibid.
‘It hasn’t always been like it, and it won’t always be like it,’ said Owen. ‘The time will come, and it’s not very far distant, when the necessaries of life will be produced for use and not for profit. The time is coming when it will no longer be possible for a few selfish people to condemn thousands of men and women and little children to live in misery and die of want.’ ibid.
So it is not true that practically the same state of affairs as we have today has always existed. It is not true that anything like the poverty that prevails at present existed at any previous period of the world’s history. When the workers were the property of their masters, it was to their owners’ interest to see that they were properly clothed and fed … ibid.
The majority of the people are in a condition of more or less abject poverty – living from hand to mouth. It is an admitted fact that about thirteen millions of our people are always on the verge of starvation. ibid.
More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or abnormal nervousness; rickets and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it. ibid.
All the evils that I have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease. ibid.
India is a rich, productive country. Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick by the capitalist and official classes. ibid.