At the best, he can but get
into the railway service, or into some house of business where they
want porters and carriers.
There is, however, a great demand for boys, who can earn five
shillings a week as shop boys, errand boys, and so forth. Our clever
lad, therefore, who has done so well at school, becomes a fruiterer's
lad, cleans out the shop, carries round the baskets, and is generally
useful; he gets a rise in a year or two, to seven shillings and
sixpence; presently he is dismissed to make room for a younger boy who
will take five shillings. Shall we follow the lad farther? If he gets,
as we hope he may, steady employment, we see him next, at the age of
fifteen, marching about the streets in the evening with a girl of the
same age to whom he makes love, and smoking 'fags,' or cigarettes.
There are thousands of such pairs to be seen everywhere; in Victoria
Park on Sundays, or Hampstead Heath on Saturday evenings, every
evening in the great thoroughfares--in Oxford Street as much as in
Whitechapel, in the music-halls and in the public-houses. You may see
them sitting together on doorsteps as well as promenading the
pavement. If there is any way of spending the evenings more
destructive of every good gift and useful quality of manhood and
womanhood than this, I know not what it is.
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