until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing
away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening,
and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like
torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.''[4]


[4] Vol. i, p. 227.


Three railway men are standing before a London coroner's
jury--a guard, an engine-driver, a signalman.
A tremendous railway accident has hurried hundreds of
passengers into another world. The negligence of the
employes is the cause of the misfortune. 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