employers. Particularly through the so-called Truck System. Under this abominable system the employers, instead of paying the wages in cash, forced their employees to take checks or orders, redeemable in all kinds of necessities and goods, but valid only in those "truck stores" or "tommy shops" run by the employers, or in which they had an interest. By cheating the workmen with goods of inferior quality, by overcharging them at the same time, by pressing them to take goods far beyond their need and wages, and by making long intervals—often from 40 to 60 days—between the real pay days, they forced the laborers into debt and absolute slavery.
The situation of many thousands of those women who tried to make a living as seamstresses was also desperate. Always put off with wages far below the demands of a modest existence, they were real martyrs of labor. Thomas Hood, one of the foremost English poets of the first half of the 19th Century, gave in his famous "Song of the Shirt" a most touching picture of such woman's toil and misery, of woman in her wasted life and in her hurried death. His poem reads:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread —
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"
"Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work—work—work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's Oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
"Work—work—work
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work—work—work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the button I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!
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