Page:Woman Triumphant.djvu/165

 have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I work in; it is very wet, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs; my clothes are always wet.'—

"Margaret Hibbs, aged eighteen, said: 'My employment after reaching the wall-face (the place where the coal is broken) is to fill my bagie or stype with two and a half or three hundred-weight of coal; I then hook it on to my chain and drag it through the seam, which is from twenty-six to twenty-eight inches high, till I get to the main road, a good distance, probably two hundred to four hundred yards. The pavement I drag over is wet, and I am obliged at all times to crawl on my hands and feet with my bagie hung to the chain and ropes. It is sad, sweating, sore and fatiguing work, and frequently maims the women.'

"Robert Bald, the government coal-viewer, stated: 'In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery underground a married woman came forward groaning under an excessive weight of coal, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said in a plaintive and melancholy voice: 'Oh sir, this is sore, sore, sore work!'

"And a sub-commissioner said: 'It is almost incredible that human beings can submit to such employment-crawling on hands and knees, harnessed like horses, over soft, slushy floors, more difficult than dragging the same weight through our lowest sewers.'"

Mackenzie, in his above mentioned book, states that "there was no machinery in these English coal-pits to drag the coal to the surface, and women climbed long wooden stairs with baskets of coal upon their backs. Children of six were habitually employed. Their hours of labor were fourteen to sixteen daily. The horrors among which they lived induced disease and early death. Law did not seem to reach to the depths of a coal-pit, and the hapless children were often mutilated and occasionally killed with perfect impunity by the brutalized miners among whom they labored."

Other authorities state that the women were paid less than 20 cents per day! For the same kind of work men got three times as much pay; but the employers preferred girls and women to do the work "because of their lower wages and greater docility!" In the iron districts of the Midlands women earned for very hard work 4 to 5 shillings a week, (—$1.25) while the men received 14 shillings.

These small wages, which forced upon the laborers the most barren mode of living, were, however, taken away again from them through the meanest tricks, devised by the