The poorer class of workers in factories and workshops are financially little better off—if, indeed, better off at all—than the poorer sort of home workers; but they have some other advantages. Their hours and conditions are in some degree regulated, and at least some degree of change and variety enters into their lives. But for them too existence is a hard battle. Upon a wage of from five to ten shillings a week life cannot but be narrow and stinted. Food, clothing, and lodging must all be of the poorest; an omnibus fare, a halfpenny newspaper, a penny stamp are luxuries in which only the thriftless indulge; and good health, as the middle class man or woman knows it, is a treasure seldom enjoyed. There is, indeed, no fact more painfully forced upon the middle class observer who becomes intimately acquainted with ill paid workers than the frequency with which they succumb to ailments that would be regarded in the observer’s own circle as trifling. Many girls injure themselves permanently by going to work when they are actually seriously ill. To stay away means loss of pay and possibly loss of employment, so they hold out to the last gasp. Many of the worst paid workers are engaged in various processes that facilitate buying and selling, rather than in actual manufacture. The paper-bags into which a civil shop assistant so obligingly pops our small purchases are given nominally without charge to us, and are bought in very large quantities at a very low rate by the shopkeeper, their real cost being paid in flesh and blood by the women who make them. Some of these women, as appears in the previous chapter, work at home; some, possibly, in well-appointed workshops, but many, as the women factory inspectors truly observe, “in the poorest kind of workshop, badly lighted, ventilated, and heated. To these conditions, no doubt, the weak, inflamed eyes so often seen among the workers are due, at least partly. The workers themselves attribute it to the strain involved in counting over the bags.”[6] This remark shows us that the simple and time-saving plan of weighing instead of counting (which is employed for wares so valuable as those of the Royal Mint) is not in use in paper-bag manufactories. Packing of various kinds occupies vast numbers of women and girls, most of whom are paid at low rates, by the dozen or the gross, and some of whom attain a celerity almost incredible. No foreman in the world can drive so hard as her own low wage drives the piece worker who has to support herself and, often enough, to help to support relatives. The most worn-out girl whom I remember ever to have seen was engaged upon no harder task than the packing of cocoa. My attention was called to her, in a room full of girls, by her ghastly appearance. She may have been eighteen or nineteen; she was absolutely colourless, and although there was no sign about her of any specific illness, seemed exhausted literally almost to death. She sat day after day pouring