ABSTRACT
John Burns grew up in a working-class family. Leaving school at ten years old, he had a variety of jobs, including in a candle factory and as an apprentice engineer. In times of bad trade and its accompanying exceptional distress, by meetings, processions, and deputations the unemployed now call public attention to their sufferings and their wants. But even more pathetic than the unemployed male worker and industrial nomad is the workless woman or girl in search of work in a city of great distances. Outside the official pauper class, as Mr. Charles Booth proves, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose standard of life and comfort, from the point of view of food, clothing, and house accommodation, is lower than that of the pauper or criminal, yet these people will not accept relief, but struggle on in the vain hope of work that never comes, and which, if it did, would find them too low to perform it.
