FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS.
It is but a narrow streak of silver
main that separates the two countries, whose story
has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied
by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected
to believe that it understood the other. Not
only the nation as a whole, however, but the worker
in each, is far from any such possibility; and the
methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time
to come, a source of bewilderment to the other.
That conditions on both sides of the Channel are in
many points at their worst, and that the labor problem
is still unsolved for both England and the Continent,
remains a truth, though it is at once evident to the
student of this problem that France has solved one
or two phases of the equation over which England is
still quite helpless.
There is a famous chapter in the history
of Ireland, entitled “Snakes in Ireland,”
the contents of which are as follows:-
“There are no snakes in Ireland.”
On the same principle it becomes at
once necessary in writing on the slums of Paris, to
arrange the summary of the situation: “There
are no slums in Paris.”
In the English sense there certainly
are none; and for the difference in visible conditions,
several causes are responsible. The searcher for
such regions discovers before the first day ends that
there are none practically; and though now and then,
as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old
Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might
lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly
a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous
squalor of London is absolutely unknown. One
quarter alone is to be excepted in this statement,
and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress
in a London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow
rooms of the East End lives in a gloom for which there
is neither outward nor inward alleviation. Soot
is king of the great city, and his prime ministers,
Smoke and Fog, work together to darken every haunt
of man, and to shut out every glimpse of sun or moon.
The flying flakes are in the air. Every breath
draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall
and floor and person. The neatest and most determined
fighter of dirt must still be bond slave to its power;
and eating and drinking and breathing soot all day
and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence
in the consequences, and only an instinctive battle
with the outward effects.
For the average worker, at the needle
at least, wages are too low to admit of much soap;
hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken means
just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens
that London poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character,
and that the visitor in the house of the workers learns
to wear a uniform which shows as little as possible
of the results of rising up and sitting down in the
soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire,
works its will no less surely.
Fresh from such experience, and with
the memory of home and work room, manufactory or great
shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the cleanliness
of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations,
is at first a constant surprise. The French workwoman,
even of the lowest order, shares in the national characteristic
which demands a fair exterior whatever may be the
interior condition, and she shares also in the thrift
which is equally a national possession, and the exercise
of which has freed France from the largest portion
of her enormous debt. The English workwoman of
the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or bag-maker,
is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears
a uniform of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which
represent the extremity of dejection. She clings
to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of respectability
and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached
a point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful,
the remnants of flowers and ribbons and any shadowy
hint of ornamentation having long ago yielded to weather
and age and other agents of destruction. The
shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both
being the badge of a condition from which emergence
has become practically impossible. These lank
figures carry no charm of womanhood,-nothing
that can draw from sweater or general employer more
than a sneer at the quality of the labor of those
waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand,
until for both the adjective comes to be “superfluous,”
and employer and employed alike wonder why the earth
holds them, and what good there is in an existence
made up simply of want and struggle.
Precisely the opposite condition holds
for the French worker, who, in the midst of problems
as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of
her nation. She has learned to the minutest fraction
what can be extracted from every centime, and though
she too must shiver with cold, and go half-fed and
half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of
something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable.
She shares too the conviction, which has come to be
part of the general faith concerning Paris, which
seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness and
want are impossible. Even her beggars, a good
proportion of them laboriously made up for the parts
they are to fill, find repression of cheerfulness
their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on
the sceptical observer of their methods, as if to
make him a partner in the encouraging and satisfactory
nature of things in general. The little seamstress
who descends from her attic for the bread with its
possible salad or bit of cheese which will form her
day’s ration, smiles also as she pauses to feel
the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and
beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped
out for Paris as a whole everything that could by
any chance be called slum.
Even in the narrowest street this
stir of eager life penetrates, and every Parisian
shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily existence.
If shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters
along in sabots, congratulating herself that
they are cheap and that they never wear out.
Custom, long-established and imperative, orders that
she shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes
the revelation bound up in the London worker’s
bonnet. Inherited instinct and training from
birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the
needle. She makes her own dress, and wears it
with an air which may in time transfer itself to something
choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by
the the cheapness of the material. It may be only
a print or some woollen stuff of the poorest order;
but it and every detail of her dress represent something
to which the English woman has not attained, and which
temperament and every fact of life will hinder her
attaining.
As I write, the charcoal-woman has
climbed the long flights to the fifth floor, bending
under the burden of an enormous sack of charbon
a terre, but smiling as she puts it down.
She is mistress of a little shop just round the corner,
and she keeps the accounts of the wood and coal bought
by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her
earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day.
Even she, black with the coal-dust which she wastes
no time in scrubbing off save on Sundays when she
too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces
the hard labor with light-hearted confidence, and
plans to save a sou here and there for the dot
of the baby who shares in the distribution of coal-dust,
and will presently trot by her side as assistant.
In the laundry just beyond, the women
are singing or chattering, the voices rising in that
sudden fury of words which comes upon this people,
and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near,
but which ebbs instantly and peacefully, to rise again
on due occasion. Long hours, exhausting labor,
small wages, make no difference. The best worker
counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity,
and the rate has even fallen below this; yet they
make no complaint, quite content with the sense of
companionship, and with the satisfaction of making
each article as perfect a specimen of skill as can
be produced.
Here lies a difference deeper than
that of temperament,-the fact that the
French worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and
counts its satisfactory appearance as a portion of
the reward. Slop work, with its demand for speedy
turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order
per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every
instinct of the French workwoman; and thus it happens
that even slop work on this side of the Channel holds
some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift
it out of the depth to which it has fallen. But
it is gaining ground, fierce competition producing
this effect everywhere; and the always lessening ratio
of wages which attends its production, must in time
bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere,
unless the tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative
production takes its place. With the French worker
in the higher forms of needle industry we shall deal
in the next chapter, finding what differences are to
be met here also between French and English methods.