Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the workers into the Abyss.  With a week’s wages between a family and pauperism, a month’s enforced idleness means hardship and misery almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do not always recover when work is to be had again.  Just now the daily papers contain the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the Dockers’ Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for months past, have not averaged a weekly income of more than from four to five shillings.  The stagnated state of the shipping industry in the port of London is held accountable for this condition of affairs.

To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age.  Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure.  It is all a matter of chance.  Everything depends upon the thing happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do.  Precaution cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it.  If they remain on the industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance against heavy odds.  Of course, if they are favourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial battlefield.  In which event the safest thing the man can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross nurse or go into a nunnery.  In either case they must forego home and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other than a nightmare.

CHAPTER XXII—­SUICIDE

With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life so remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common.  So common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper without running across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites no more interest than an ordinary “drunk,” and is handled with the same rapidity and unconcern.

I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court.  I pride myself that I have good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men and things; but I confess, as I stood in that court-room, that I was half bewildered by the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies, vagrants, brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences, gamblers, and women of the street went through the machine of justice.  The dock stood in the centre of the court (where the light is best), and into it and out again stepped men, women, and children, in a stream as steady as the stream of sentences which fell from the magistrate’s lips.

I was still pondering over a consumptive “fence” who had pleaded inability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children, and who had received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of about twenty appeared in the dock.  “Alfred Freeman,” I caught his name, but failed to catch the charge.  A stout and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in the witness-box and began her testimony.  Wife of the Britannia lock-keeper, I learned she was.  Time, night; a splash; she ran to the lock and found the prisoner in the water.