You may say that you buy your matches all the same, but you
buy them at a shop where you may or may not have reason to believe that
the attendants are well paid. But that will not benefit the girls, whose
business you have destroyed; they will not be employed in the shops, for
they belong to a different grade of labour. This dilemma meets the
social reformer at each step; the complexity of industrial relations
appears to turn the chariot of progress into a Juggernaut's car, to
crush a number of innocent victims with each advance it makes. One thing
is evident, that if the consuming public were to regulate its acts of
purchase with every possible regard to the condition of the workers,
they could not ensure that every worker should have good regular work
for decent wages.
In arriving at this conclusion, we are far from maintaining that the
public even in its private capacity as a body of consumers could do
nothing. A certain portion of responsibility rests on the public, as we
saw it rested on employers and on middlemen. But the malady is rightly
traceable in its full force neither to the action of individuals nor of
industrial classes, but to the relation which subsists between these
individuals and classes; that is, to the nature and character of the
industrial system in its present working. This may seem a vague
statement, but it is correct; the desire to be prematurely definite has
led to a narrow conception of the "sweating" malady, which more than
anything else has impeded efforts at reform.
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