docker making twenty shillings a week the difference of two shillings is
not merely important, it is vital. The addition of it may mean three
rooms for the family instead of two; it may mean nine shillings a week
instead of seven to feed five mouths; it may mean meat twice a week, or
half as much more bread and margarine than before, or a saving for
second-hand clothes, and perhaps threepenn'orth of pleasure. In full
work a docker at the old 7d. an hour would make more than twenty
shillings a week; but the full weeks are rare, and about eighteen
shillings would be all he could get on an average. The extra penny an
hour for three days' work might bring him in about half a crown. To him
and to his wife and children the difference was not merely important, it
was vital.

Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South
London, and got it. We may put their average wage at nine shillings a
week. In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three,
including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent
of one room. Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda.
That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people. Even
Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure
on that amount were equal to his own. But the women jam-makers won an
advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1_s_.
3_d_. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling
rise. It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery's standard yet. It did not
represent the _Times_ paradise of sitting idle in the shade. But think
what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid
pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea! Or
think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North,
who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the
compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose