Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South London, and got it.  We may put their average wage at nine shillings a week.  In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three, including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent of one room.  Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda.  That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people.  Even Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure on that amount were equal to his own.  But the women jam-makers won an advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1_s_. 3_d_. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling rise.  It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery’s standard yet.  It did not represent the Times paradise of sitting idle in the shade.  But think what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea!  Or think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North, who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose them two of their dinners—­twice the penn’orth of bread and ha’porth of cheese that they always enjoyed for dinner!

When I was assisting in an inquiry into wages and expenditure some years ago, one head of a family added as a note at the foot of his budget:  “I see that we always spend more than we earn, but as we are never in debt I attribute this result to the thriftiness of my wife.”  Behind that sentence a history of grievances patiently endured is written, but only the Times would wonder that such grievances are discovered to be intolerable the moment a gleam of hope appears.  When the Times, in the same article, went on to protest that if the railwaymen struck, they would be kicking not only against the Companies but “against the nature of things,” I have no clear idea of the meaning.  The nature of things is no doubt very terrible and strong, but for working people the most terrible and strongest part of it is poverty.  All else is sophisticated; here is the thing itself.  One remembers two sentences in Mr. Shaw’s preface to Major Barbara: 

“The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love, and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money.  And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.”

Strikes are the children of Poverty by Hope.  For a long time past the wealth of the country has rapidly increased.  Gold has poured into it from South Africa, dividends from all the world; trade has boomed, great fortunes have been made; luxury has