Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
But food is only one of the materials which we should handle. At our
Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the
streets destitute and miserable. He is now saved, and happy, and
cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates. That shoemaker, I
foresee, is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at
work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London. Already in
some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old
shoes into new. They call the men so employed translators. Boots and
shoes, as every wearer of them knows, do not go to pieces all at once
or in all parts at once. The sole often wears out utterly, while the
upper leather is quite good, or the upper leather bursts while the sole
remains practically in a salvable condition; but your individual pair
of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is
hopelessly gone to the bad. But give our trained artist in leather and
his army of assistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes,
and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of
wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs, which, if not quite
good, will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which
cover the feet of many a poor tramp, to say nothing of the thousands of
poor children who are at the present moment attending our public
schools. In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe
Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes
warranted not to let in water between the school house and home. When
you remember the 43,000 children who are reported by the School Board
to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving, do you not
think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose, with
advantage, the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?
This, however, is only one branch of industry. Take old umbrellas.
We all know the itinerant umbrella mender, whose appearance in the
neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her
poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises.
But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can
be rescued from the dust heap. Side by side with our Boot Factory we
shall have a great umbrella works. The ironwork of one umbrella will
be fitted to the stick of another, and even from those that are too
hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty
of use for their steels and whalebone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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