Sweating in Melbourne.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 6825, 2 August 1893, Page 3

Sweating in Melbourne.

♦ The terrible facts (remarks the Melbourne Age) which are being dragged to light by the Sweating Board will bmootb the way for Mr Deakin's Factory Act Auiendinunt Bill. The barest recital of these faots is enough to make a sensitive nature shudder. To think of a civilised community—to say nothing at all about a Christian one—calmly standing by and looking on while helpless poverty ie being ground into the grave with over toil and under pay, is to suggest what a mere veneer there is oovoring our innate savagery. Wβ read of Leprae cracking his whip on the stave plantations, and thank Heaven with a pharisaic grimace that we are not ua the rest of men—like those brutal hluvo m istere, to wit. -ut no JJegceo was ever a more bmtal tyrant to hia blaok bond sUvea than is the By?tem of uuliinited " freedom of coutract,"which eneourageethseweater to etand over his heipleae victiwj of the arbiter of life and death, and give out hia pittance only in return for the life fcweat of his workers. We talk of libert, m a priceless gift, and we affect horror tt thd acts of the Arab slave- atoaiere. And we are right, no doubt But, if those tawny pluudorors of the de=ert had but a newspaper press of their own, and a Melbourne correspondent to tell them of how citizens of thi3 "marvellous" metropolis reduce their own kith and kin to v condition of abject penury, the chances are that Tippoo Tib himbelf would feel horrified at our cruolties. What feeling of liberty, of self-respect—what hope, what aims—can animate those hapless ones who, spending every waking hour over their needles for tho. bare means of keeping lifo in theic wasting frames, tremble at the mere suggestion that they should toll the tale of their wrongs, lest their task-mast!re should withdraw the last frail means of subsistence, and leave them to die aloie in theic starving solitude! Liberty! The poor wretches have not even tho freedom of speeoh to speak their own sorrows. And all this i a not only tolerated, but insisted upon, lest tho rich man's right of "free contract" should be invaded.