At seven and sixpence, perhaps, she gets taken on; and when, presently, the slack time comes again, the girls weeded out, to be first discharged, are those who have been receiving eight shillings weekly ever since their engagement in the previous season. Seven shillings and sixpence a week (translated or not, according to the custom of the factory, into terms of piece work) now becomes the usual wage; and next season this descends by another sixpence or another shilling. Below six shillings or five shillings, an employer or foreman seldom tries to drive the time wage, even of girls, unless, indeed, he can salve his conscience by regarding them as learners. Yet I have known a wealthy employer admit without any signs of compunction, both that certain girls in his employ were paid four shillings a week, and that they could not live on that sum. The home worker, when he thus suffers diminution of an already insufficient wage, tries to increase output by setting his children to work. “The same pressure that leads to the employment of the children presently leads, in a slack time, to the acceptance of yet lower pay for the sake of securing work. The poorer the worker the less possible is any resistance to any reduction in pay. Thus, by and by, mother and children, working together, come to receive no more than did the mother working alone. The employer—and eventually in all probability the public—has in fact obtained the labour of the children without extra payment. To such an extent has this process been carried that in the worst paid branches of home work, subsistence becomes almost impossible unless the work of children is called in.”[58] It is thus true that, economically, a man’s enemies are those of his own household; and that, wherever workers are not protected by organisation or by special laws, the wage, first of the individual and then of the family, tends to be brought down to the lowest possible level of subsistence, and even, possibly if a poor-law subsidy can be obtained, below it. It is not by chance, nor because their work is of little value, nor because they are contented to take little pay, that all these many households of workers are living lives so cruelly straitened by poverty. Nor is it a mere effect of chance that in other countries as well as in our own, national wealth is beheld increasing side by side with extreme poverty on the part of those citizens who toil most incessantly. In our own country, the investigations of Mr Charles Booth and of Mr Seebohm Rowntree, carried out independently and on slightly differing methods, the one in London, the other in York, have resulted in figures strikingly similar. Mr Booth puts the proportion living in poverty, of the whole population of London, at 30·7%; Mr Rowntree, that of the whole population of York, at 27·84%.[59]