"Oh! but for one short hour!
A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,
But only time for Grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!"
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,
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!
She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"
Constantly struggling with want and poverty and seeing health menaced by the machines, the working classes of England were filled with bitterness, when they found that their complaints brought no relief, while the law-makers, sitting in Parliament, favored any demands of the employers and of the big interests. To forget for a few hours their hopeless existence, large numbers of men and women resorted to liquor, hereby hastening their final collapse and ruin.
Such was the life led by English laborers during the greater part of the Nineteenth Century. Feeble attempts to improve these deplorable conditions were made through a series of "Factory Acts," the immediate cause for which was the fearful spread of epidemic diseases which wrought dreadful havoc among the laborers, especially among the women and children. If we glance over these factory acts, as they are sketched in the Encyclopædia Britannica, we find that even under these acts children below the age of nine were permitted in silk factories, and that they were required to work twelve hours a day, exclusive of an hour and a half for meal times. An act of 1833 provided that young persons from thirteen to eighteen and women were restricted to 68 hours a week. Ten years later a mining act was passed which prohibited underground work for children under ten and for women. In 1867 the Workshop Regulation Act fixed the working day for children from 6 a. m. to 8 p. m.—14 hours, and for young persons and women from 5 a. m. to 9 p. m.—16 hours! After having made such sad disclosures, the Encyclopædia Britannica dared to say: By these various enactments the state has emphatically taken under its pro-
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