enviable one. Granting that wages are much higher than half a century ago,
when bread cost fivepence-halfpenny the loaf as against three halfpence
to-day, and when clothes and furniture cost fifty per cent. more than now,
the average working-man cannot be otherwise described than as distinctly
poor when compared with his English colleague. Yet it would be misleading
to judge exclusively by the scale of wages, and against making comparisons
of the kind the reader should at once be warned. The fact is that there
are very wide divergences of condition amongst the working classes of
Holland. A carpenter or a blacksmith earning from L1 to L1 10s. in weekly
wages all the year round will rank, if sober and well-behaved, as a
comparatively well-to-do workman. On the other hand, a bricklayer or a
painter, whose work in winter is very uncertain, and who earns, maybe, a
bare L1 a week during the nine months of the year wherein he can find
work, is a poor workman at the best, and his condition is greatly to be
deplored. More pitiable still, however, is the case of working-class
families in some of the manufacturing towns, where wages are still lower,
and where an even tolerable standard of life cannot be maintained unless
mother and children take their place in the factory side by side with the
head of the household as regular wage-earners.

For, as labour is cheap and families are numerous in Holland, as soon as
the boys and girls have reached the sacramental age of twelve, at which
Dutch law allows them to work twelve hours a day, they leave school, and
enter the factory and workshop.

It is no joke for these children, who have to leave their little beds,
frequently under the tiles, at 5 or 6 a.m., or earlier, summer and winter,
to gulp down some hot coffee, or what is conveniently called so, to
swallow a huge piece of the well-known Dutch 'Roggebrood,' or rye-bread,
and then to hurry, in their wooden shoes, through the quiet streets of the