Some new idea seemed twinkling in the fellow's cunning bloated face as he
spoke. I, and others also, shuddered at his words; but we all forgot them a
moment afterwards, as Crossthwaite began to speak.

"We were all bound to expect this. Every working tailor must come to this
at last, on the present system; and we are only lucky in having been spared
so long. You all know where this will end--in the same misery as fifteen
thousand out of twenty thousand of our class are enduring now. We shall
become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and
sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to
face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing
profits made out of that labour by the contractors who will employ
us--arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings--the competition
of women, and children, and starving Irish--our hours of work will increase
one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this
we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more
penury, slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by
fifties--almost by hundreds--yearly, out of the honourable trade in which
we were brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, which is
devouring our trade and many others, body and soul. Our wives will be
forced to sit up night and day to help us--our children must labour from
the cradle without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the
fresh air of heaven,--our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or
paupers--our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable
earnings by prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what
one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there will be no
hope for us. There is no use appealing to government or parliament. I don't
want to talk politics here. I shall keep them for another place. But you
can recollect as well as I can, when a deputation of us went up to a