They declare
with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years
before, their labor only lasted eight hours a day. During
the last five or six years it had been screwed up to
14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a specially severe pressure
of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it
often lasted 40 or 50 hours without a break. They
were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their
labor-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain
ceased to think, their eyes to see. The thoroughly
``respectable'' British jurymen answered by a verdict that
sent them to the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter,
and, in a gentle ``rider'' to their verdict, expressed the
pious hope that the capitalistic magnates of the railways
would, in future, be more extravagant in the purchase of
a sufficient quantity of labor-power, and more ``abstemious,''
more ``self-denying,'' more ``thrifty,'' in the
draining of paid labor-power.[5]
[5] Vol. i, pp. 237, 238.
In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily
papers published a paragraph with the ``sensational''
heading, ``Death from simple over-work.'' It dealt with
the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years
of age, employed in a highly respectable dressmaking
establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name
of Elise.
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