ABSTRACT
We find that a very considerable number of persons are employed in the duty of rolling linen and calico bandages for transmission to the hospitals in the East. A chemist at the north end of London has alone had it in commission to prepare eighty thousand such bandages. He pays the people whom he employs—and they are indiscriminately taken from the humbler classes—at the rate of half-a-crown or two shillings and threepence the gross, or about £1 per 1,000, consequently he has paid £80. Now, it is to be presumed that he is paid a higher sum by those who employ him, and they, perhaps, reserve a margin. As this chemist is only one out of several persons similarly situated who share the business and its advantages, we may conclude that some hundreds of pounds of the public money are thus spent in the rolling of bandages. The question which then suggests itself is naturally this—why should a task so exceedingly simple in itself be committed to other hands than those of the Soldiers’ wives? To whom does the duty and any little profit that may accrue from it so naturally belong as to those who, were they on the spot, would be the nurses and dressers of the wounded men? We ask again—and we shall repeat the enquiry upon every fitting occasion—why is not the Soldier’s wife converted into a profitable member of society? Why is the money of the country lavished on those who have other means of support, while the poor woman who has married a Soldier is left to vegetate upon eleemosynary bounty or to starve on the pitiful remittance made by her poor husband? Really these matters are not above the consideration of the War-office.
