In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers.”  To-morrow morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men,” wrote Sidney Webb, “will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be turned workless away.”  We worked for children’s dinners.  “If we insist on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall be fed?  If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and torture many of them to death.  Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into their dim lives this new pang.  ’Why not leave us alone? ’ask the pathetically patient little faces.  Why not, indeed, since for these child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food.”  We cried out against “cheap goods,” that meant “sweated and therefore stolen goods.”  “The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.  We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in exchange; so much of our neighbour’s labour has been put into the thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the owners of his product.”

This branch of our work led to a big fight—­a fight most happy in its results.  At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a Consumers’ League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated “clean” from unfair wage.  H.H.  Champion, in the discussion that followed, drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value of the original L5 shares was quoted at L18 7s. 6d.  Herbert Burrows and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.  “A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who ‘earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.’  Out of the earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room.  The child lives only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where ’you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots of it.’” We published the facts under the title of “White Slavery in London,” and called for a boycott of Bryant & May’s matches.  “It is time some one came and helped us,” said two pale-faced girls to me; and I asked:  “Who will help?  Plenty of people wish well to any good cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support.  ’Some one ought to do it, but why should I?’ is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.  ‘Some one ought to do it, so why not I?’ is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.  Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.”