CHAP xx. THE DEMON OF GREED. 35a 



another street were found several children entirely 

 naked (tins in the severest days of the long frost)! 

 Their mother had been out since morning, looking for 

 work. Several cases were found where the family had 

 been without food (sometimes without fire also) for 

 three days." And while all this was going on, and in 

 one street there were 115 adults out of work, 80 of whom 

 had been so from one to nine months, there were, in the 

 same district, between seven and eight thousand paupers 

 in the various workhouse institutions. 



As one more example from a different area we have 

 Mrs. Hogg's account of the fur-pullers of South London, 

 in the Nineteenth Century of November, 1897: 



" The room is barely eight feet square, and it has to 

 serve for day and night alike. Pushed into one corner 

 is the bed, a dirty pallet tied together with string, upon 

 which is piled a black heap of bedclothes. On one half 

 of the table are the remains of breakfast a crust of 

 bread, a piece of butter, and a cracked cup, all thickly 

 coated with the all-pervading hairs. The other half is 

 covered with pulled skins waiting to be taken to the 

 shop. The window is tightly closed, because such air 

 as can find its way in from the stifling court below 

 would force the hairs into the noses and eyes and lungs 

 of the workers, and make life more intolerable for them 

 than it is already. To the visitor, indeed, the choking 

 sensation caused by the passage of the hairs into the 

 throat, and the nausea from the smell of the skins, is, at 

 first, almost too overpowering for speech." 



Two women work in this horrible place for twelve 

 hours a day, and can then earn only Is. 4^., out of which 

 comes cost of knives and knife-grinding, and fines and 



