Sweating (labor)

“ Her experience was to the effect that it is only by the sweated farthing that in these days of cut-throat competition shops which sell things made by hand or by the sewing-machine can pay their expenses, that the sweater is himself sweated, and that the workwoman, starving under the sweating system, mistrusts any other and is an element of danger in the very workroom which is founded for her emancipation. ”

“ The sweating is done either in a “den,” a room hired by the contractor, without any provisions suitable for a crowd of different sexes, and filled to its utmost capacity by people who can not afford to be clean or to stop working if sick; or else at home, where the garments or cigars are often handled by consumptives and filth abounds among the wretched toilers. They in many cases work 15 hours a day, seven days to the week. ”

“ The co-operative store, which we thought would be found all right, has lately adopted the 'sweating' system in their tailoring business, thus coming down to the level of all the others of this class, who employ 'sweaters' only. We are strongly of opinion that public attention has only to be drawn to so great an evil to obtain a remedy, and we think the best remedy is to put under the Workshops Act the whole of the places where any sort of manufacturing industry is carried on. ”

“ Not certainly while they use little or no muscular exercise, by washing, once a day, their hands and faces merely, or, as some say, their fingers, their noses, and the tips of their chins. They may talk, on occasions, very boldly and flippantly, about sweating away a cold, as they term it; but do they vainly suppose that the sweat vessels or sweating machinery has nothing to do, from day to day, which might prevent the necessity of resorting to these sweating processes? ”

“ Sweating as the result of physical exercise has a powerful effect upon the mind, as well as upon the body; it clears the vision and invigorates the brain, and is a perfect medicine for many ailments, both mental and physical. If many of the languid and indolent, who never do any work or indulge in sturdy exercise, were suddenly to rouse themselves up and do sufficient physical labour, either for themselves or for someone else, to procure a good sweating at least twice a week, they would feel immeasurably better for it. ”

“ It is also probable that by such sweating procedures toxic products, which are deleterious to the nervous system, can be removed. Perspiration can also be caused by bodily movement through exercise. In such cases, as proved by physiological experiments, impulses are sent to the vasomotor centers, which result in a widening of the capillaries through the excitation of such centers. Thus sweating is created by fast walking, running, 240and frequently also by horseback riding, and by various kinds of sports, such as cycling. ”

“ Now when a person is labouring by a fire, or at washing or ironing, the blood is made to circulate much faster, and the noxious matter is thrown out more abundantly. At such times the matter thrown out by the skin becomes visible in the form of drops of sweat. Of course the more of this matter is to be thrown out by the skin, the more dangerous it is to have the openings of the skin shrunk up by cold. Therefore, it is very important for persons who labour, to take very great care not to allow themselves to be chilled when in a state of perspiration. ”

“ You are fair without and foul within. Your alimentary canal is overloaded and your blood is so unclean that it has poisoned your nervous system. Eat less, take more exercise and drink plenty—of water. Try to be as clean as your gardener." It has been remarked that the labourer who sweats at his work is, in reality, far cleaner than the bathing sedentary man, for the labourer has a daily sweat-bath, whereas the other only washes the outside of him: the cleanliness of the latter is skin-deep, and of the former blood-deep. ”

“ For sodenly a dedly and burnyng sweate inuaded their bodyes and vexed their bloud with a most ardent heat, infested the stomack and the head greuously: by the tormentyng and vexacion of which sicknes, men were so sore handled and so painfully pangued that if they were layed in their bed, beyng not hable to suffre the importunate heat, they cast away the shetes and all the clothes liyng on the bed. ”

“ Hundreds work at home under the same conditions as depicted in other places; the middleman, or master sweater, employing men at his home at from 17s. to £1 per week, women and girls from 1s. per day and upwards ”

“ That this is true, the self sweates do shewe. For as in vtter businesses, bodies yt sore do labour, by trauail of the same are forced to sweat, so in inner diseases, the bodies traueiled & labored by thẽ, are moued to the like. In which labors, if nature be strõg & able to thrust out the poisõ by sweat (not otherwise letted) ye persõ escapeth: if not, it dieth. That it is a feuer, thus I haue partly declared, and more wil streight by the notes of the disease, vnder one shewing also by thesame notes, signes, and short tariance of the same, that it consisteth in the spirites. ”

“ Others in "working-stalls" stand in cold water all day, and have the hands in cold water; and in laundries, confectionery establishments, etc., excessive heat and standing in steam make workers especially liable to throat and lung diseases, as well as those induced by continuous standing. ”

“ Under the date of July, 1508, he says that some of the household of the Lord Treasurer were seized with the sweat, and died of it, “and everywhere in this city there die not a few.” In August public prayers were made at St Paul’s on account of the plague of sweat. In the same month the king’s movements from place to place in the country round London are described as determined by the prevalence of the sweat. ”

“ Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!" ”

“ And a cold sweat trills down o'er all my limbs, As if I were dissolving into water. ”

“ The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments that, taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. ”

“ She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not much compassion for colds in the head without fever or sore throat. ”

“ but these factory people, who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?" ”

“ I saw four manner of dryings: the first was bloodlessness; the second was pain following after; the third, hanging up in the air, as men hang a cloth to dry; the fourth, that the bodily Kind asked liquid and there was no manner of comfort ministered to Him in all His woe and distress. Ah! hard and grievous was his pain, but much more hard and grievous it was when the moisture failed and began to dry thus, shrivelling.
These were the pains that shewed in the blessed head: the first wrought to the dying, while it had moisture; and that other, slow, with shrinking drying, [and] ”

“ "Fifteen hundred or two thousand workpeople are working without rest in unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of starvation, and only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in the tavern; ”

“ The sweat of industry would dry and die But for the end it works to. ”

“ It was high time, for I now began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the sea-water that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache. ”

“ And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"
"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze." ”

“ What physicians call the perspirable matter, is that vapour which passes off from our bodies, from the lungs, and through the pores of the skin. The quantity of this is said to be five-eighths of what we eat. ”

“ If the Parks be ‘the lungs of London,’ we wonder what Greenwich Fair is—a periodical breaking out, we suppose, a sort of spring-rash: a three days’ fever, which cools the blood for six months afterwards, and at the expiration of which London is restored to its old habits of plodding industry, as suddenly and completely as if nothing had ever happened to disturb them. ”

“ fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen, and therefore by doctors. ”

“ Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as “Seven years hard.” ”

“ Almost every labourer has his Sunday suit, very often really good clothes, sometimes glossy black, with the regulation "chimneypot." His unfortunate walk betrays him, dress how he will. ”

“ Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons—mostly women to do the dish-washing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. ”

“ In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs. ”

“ In the square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing--unlike pure heat it held no promise of rural escape but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. ”

“ if Exercise raises proper Ferments in the Humours, and promotes the Circulation of the Blood, Temperance gives Nature her full Play, and enables her to exert her self in all her Force and Vigour; ”

“ The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs. ”

“ It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! ”

“ Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever—your veins are full of ice-water—but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance." ”

“ It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the “cooler,” and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest. ”

“ Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the midnight oil he burned. Work! She knew that he outdid her, though his work was of a different order. And she was surprised to behold that the less food he had, the harder he worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would send him in a loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act with banter to the effect that it was better than he could bake. ”

“ It was part of Adam's punishment, In the sweat of thy brows thou shalt eat thy bread: it is multiplied to me, I have earned bread in the sweat of my brows, in the labour of my calling, and I have it; and I sweat again and again, from the brow to the sole of the foot, but I eat no bread, I taste no sustenance: miserable distribution of mankind, where one half lacks meat, and the other stomach! ”

“ All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched. ”

“ They knew so well how it felt, that they kept one bed in the boys' room, and any man who came at dusk got his supper, to sleep there, and his breakfast, and there never was anything to pay. The girls always scolded dreadfully about the extra washing, but mother said she slept on sheets when she came out, and some one washed them. ”

“ Workmen's compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold, consolations, if there be no employment. ”

“ He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. ”

“ Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites. ”

“ Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. ”