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Deduct from the 9s. weekly wage—

s. d. Rent 33 Schooling 2 Firing 10 Clothes 9 Washing 6 58

and 3s.4d. is left with which to provide breakfast and tea for a hard-working woman for seven days in the week, dinner for Sunday, and three meals daily for two growing children of ten and eleven. We have seen how, even with economy, knowledge, strength, and time, proper food cannot be obtained for less than 1d. or 1¼d. a meal, and this would make a weekly total of 5s.11¼d. 3s.4d., with no time, with little knowledge, and only the remnants of strength, which has been used up in earning the 3s.4d., is all Mrs. Marshall has with which to meet these requirements.

And how do the rich look on these facts? ‘Well! nine shillings a week is very fair wage for an unskilled working woman,’ was the remark I heard after I had told these facts to mine host at a country house, where we were eating the usual regulation dinner—soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweets, and hot-house fruits, said with the complacency of satisfaction which follows a glass of good wine. ‘Yes, about the cost of your one dinner’s wine!’ replied one of the guests; but then he was probably one of those ill-balanced people who judge people by what they are rather than by what they have, and he may have thought that the sad, lone woman, with her noble virtues of industry, patience, and self-sacrificing love, had, despite her hard manners, more right to the good things of this world than the suave old man owning fourteen acres of lawn on which no children ever played, and stating, without shame, first, the fact that he used eighty-two tons of coal yearly to warm his own sitting-rooms, and then the opinion that 9s. a week was fair wage on which to support a good woman and bring up two children.