第52章 TO THE RESCUE!--THE CITY COLONY.(12)

But food is only one of the materials which we should handle.At our Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the streets destitute and miserable.He is now saved,and happy,and cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates.That shoemaker,Iforesee,is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London.Already in some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old shoes into new.They call the men so employed translators.Boots and shoes,as every wearer of them knows,do not go to pieces all at once or in all parts at once.The sole often wears out utterly,while the upper leather is quite good,or the upper leather bursts while the sole remains practically in a salvable condition;but your individual pair of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is hopelessly gone to the bad.But give our trained artist in leather and his army of assistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes,and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs,which,if not quite good,will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which cover the feet of many a poor tramp,to say nothing of the thousands of poor children who are at the present moment attending our public schools.In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes warranted not to let in water between the school house and home.When you remember the 43,000children who are reported by the School Board to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving,do you not think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose,with advantage,the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?

This,however,is only one branch of industry.Take old umbrellas.

We all know the itinerant umbrella mender,whose appearance in the neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises.

But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can be rescued from the dust heap.Side by side with our Boot Factory we shall have a great umbrella works.The ironwork of one umbrella will be fitted to the stick of another,and even from those that are too hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty of use for their steels and whalebone.

So I might go on.Bottles are a fertile source of minor domestic worry.When you buy a bottle you have to pay a penny for it;but when you have emptied it you cannot get a penny back;no,nor even a farthing.You throw your empty bottle either into the dust heap,or let it lie about.But if we could collect all the waste bottles of London every day,it would go hardly with us if we could not turn a very pretty penny by washing them,sorting them,and sending them out on a new lease of life.The washing of old bottles alone will keep a considerable number of people going.

I can imagine the objection which will be raised by some shortsighted people,that by giving the old,second-hand material a new lease of life it will be said that we shall diminish the demand for new material,and so curtail work and wages at one end while we are endeavouring to piece on something at the other.This objection reminds me of a remark of a North Country pilot who,when speaking of the dulness in the shipbuilding industry,said that nothing would do any good but a series of heavy storms,which would send a goodly number of ocean-going steamers to the bottom,to replace which,this political economist thought,the yards would once more be filled with orders.

This,however,is not the way in which work is supplied.Economy is a great auxiliary to trade,inasmuch as the money saved is expended on other products of industry.

There is one material that is continually increasing in quantity,which is the despair of the life of the householder and of the Local Sanitary Authority.I refer to the tins in which provisions are supplied.

Nowadays everything comes to us in tins.We have coffee tins,meat tins,salmon tins,and tins ad nauseam.Tin is becoming more and more the universal envelope of the rations of man.But when you have extracted the contents of the tin what can you do with it?

Huge mountains of empty tins lie about every dustyard,for as yet no man has discovered a means of utilising them when in great masses.

Their market price is about four or five shillings a ton,but they are so light that it would take half a dozen trucks to hold a ton.

They formerly burnt them for the sake of the solder,but now,by a new process,they are jointed without solder.The problem of the utilisation of the tins is one to which we would have to address ourselves,and I am by no means desponding as to the result.