SHOOTING NIAGARA 227

advertisements from which their profits came depended on their
giving to the million what the million wanted.1 Being obscure
it wanted flattery and being poor a share of the pleasures of the
rich. The cheap newspaper gave it the one and fed its appetite
for the other. It promised that a timq was coming when the
hungry should be filled with good things.

For the intelligent young worker, to whom state education
had given the key to the world of books and new ideas,
and to whom the pub and the humorous philosophy of his
class were insufficient solace, the background of life—even
though it was already vastly improved—was dreary and un-
inspiring. As Joe Toole remembered, it was that of the street
corner, the smell of the tripe-works, the clatter of dogs, the
street brawls, short commons, the pawnshop and the cries of
women giving birth to new citizens.2 The usual lot was to start
selling papers after school hours at eleven, borrowing 4^d. to
purchase thirteen with a hope of making 2d. profit for each
bundle sold. Three years later the scholar left school to plunge
into a battle for life which took the form of constantly chang-
ing casual labour—sweeping floors or streets, holding horses'
heads for commercial travellers, laying tram tracks, storekeeping,
running errands and monotonous machine-minding sometimes
for ten hours at a stretch. All these occupations were "blind
alley": the weaker brethren never climbed beyond them out of
the ruck of the unskilled. Between jobs one stood at the corner
of the street or scoured the shop windows for a notice of "Boy
Wanted.'* In such a start to life there were constant temptations:
the skylarking, chi'iking gang of boon companions who slipped
imperceptibly from practical joking into petty larceny on sweet
shops and battles with sticks and broken glass; the pubs to which
a boy became accustomed from his earliest years, the racecourse
and the bookie at the street corner. Later came the long losing
battle with poverty, undernourishment and insecurity, the home
with the verminous walls and broken window-sashes in the
crowded dirty street, the risk of accident and maiming, and the
certainty sooner or later of "slack times'* and unemployment
with the sickening tramp from factory gate to gate, the days of

1 During a strike, a delegation of employers called on the editor of a popular news-
paper to remonstrate with him for upholding the strikers' cause. "Well, gentlemen,"
he replied, "the working man's penny is as good as yours, and there's a damned sight
more of 'em!"— W. E* Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, //., 615.

* Fighting fhrwgh Life,