Even at this they cannot all get employment. Although the plea made for Capitalism by the professors of The Manchester School was that at least it would always provide the workers with employment at a living wage, it has never either kept that promise or justified that plea. The employers have had to confess that they need what is called “a reserve army of unemployed”, so that they can always pick up “hands” when trade is good and throw them back into the street when it is bad. Throwing them back into the street means forcing them to spend the few shillings they may have been able to put by while employed, selling or pawning their clothes and furniture, and finally going on the rates as paupers. The ratepayers naturally object very strongly to having to support the employer’s workmen whenever he does not happen to want them; consequently, when the Capitalist system developed on a large scale, the ratepayers made Poor Law relief such a disgraceful, cruel, and degrading business that decent working class families would suffer any extremity rather than resort to it. We said to the unemployed father of a starving family, “We must feed you and your children if you are destitute, because the Statute of Elizabeth obliges us to; but you must bring your daughters and sons into the workhouse with you to live with drunkards, prostitutes, tramps, idiots, epileptics, old criminals, the very dregs and refuse of human society at its worst, and having done that you will never be able to hold up your head again among your fellows”. The man naturally said “Thank you: I had rather see my children dead”, and starved it out as best he could until trade revived, and the employers had another job for him. And to get that job he would accept the barest wages the family could support life on. If his children could earn a little in a factory he would snatch at wages that were just enough, when the children’s earnings were thrown in, to support them all; and in this way he did not benefit in the long run by letting his children go out to work, as it ended in their earnings being used to beat down his own wages; so that, though he at first sent his children into the factories to get a little extra money, he was at last forced to do it to make up his own wages to subsistence point; and when the law stepped in to rescue the children from their slavery, he opposed the law because he did not see how he could live unless his children earned something instead of going to school. 48 WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET