LONDON'S " JUNGLE."

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12946, 28 July 1906, Page 7

LONDON'S " JUNGLE."

London, so the " Daily Express" tells us, has its "Jungle" as well as Chicago. It is to 'be found in the heart of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, the home of the sweated alien tailor. These East End victims of the sweater struck recently, and the strike directed attention once more to the terrible conditions under ■which they live. Twelve, thousand of these men struck as a protest against their low wages and their hcuii3. " They are not prepossessing in appearance," says the " ibaily Express." "Their faces are sallow from poor living and insanitary dwellings. They*are- herded like rats in cellars ana garrets, and after 'working for sixteen or eighteen hours in a foul hovel they gt> 'home to rest in ,a room in which a wife and -half a dozen children live by day and rsle&p at night. In this Jungle the ravening tiger of consumption waxes fat. LVlen who escape consumption are marked down by chronic bronchitis. The seeds of lung disease "ire in the air of every East End sweating den." These men, it is pathetic to notice, are striking for a twelve-hour day. In a small upper room in these slums, in -which a single (English carpenter would refuse to work, half a dozen wretched Jewish tailors are horded together for fourteen or sixteen, or even twenty hours at a stretch. Thoir wages are- little more than £1 a week, * a large proportion of 'which goes in rent, ■and most of them have four or live children. The consequence is that they are half-starved, and live chiefly on "herrings. It ie not the shopkeeper they complain of, but the middleman sweater. For instance, frock caats sell to cheap shops at 10s. The sweater keeps from Gs to 7s of this, and the workman gets tiho balance. Many lounge coats are made for Gs (kl, of which.five workmen divide 3s BJ>d between them. All tho sweater lias to provide is cotton and a .room in his house, and the cotton ho buys 'with the proceeds of cloth savings. For £4 or £5 a tailor can become a master, and if he is inhuman, takes his revenge >by sweating Jug employee, but numbers toil for years without being able to save so much. And ■all over London men are wearing clothes made in these sweating dons, without knowing the misery in which they are produced. " 'Half the men in London would take off their coats in a hurry if they could only see the conditions in which they are made," a half-starved tailor said 'with a grim smile. " They are not wearing coats merely. They are wearing part of our lives, of which we are robbed by our sweating masters." In tho meantiui'j every ship coming to London from Germany and Russia brings more aliens anxious to work for the money rejected by the .strikers. Tho Aliens Act us practically a, dead letter.