The Slavery of Our Times
Translated by Aylmer Maude
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The opening
CHAPTEE I GOODS-PORTEKS WHO WORK THIRTY-SEVEN HOURS
GOODS-PORTEKS WHO WORK THIRTY-SEVEN HOURS
AN acquaintance of mine, who serves on the Moscow-Kursk Railway as a weigher, in the course of conversation mentioned to me that the men who load the goods on to his scales work for thirty-six hours on end.
Though I had full confidence in the speaker’s truthfulness, I was unable to believe him. I thought he was making a mistake, or exaggerating, or that I misunderstood something.
But the weigher narrated the conditions under which this work is done, so exactly that there was no room left for doubt. He told me that there are two hundred and fifty such goods-porters at the Kursk Station in Moscow. They were all divided into gangs of five men, and were on piece-work, receiving from 1 rouble to K. 1.15 (say 2s. to 2s. 4d.) for one thousand poods (over sixteen tons) of goods received or despatched.
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About this edition
- The words
- Aylmer Maude's English translation, copied word for word.
- Left out
- Page numbers and running heads from the printed pages, in 25 places
- The library's stamps, barcode and date-due slip (University of California, San Diego) (12 blocks)
- The half-title
- Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers, in 2 places
- A library shelf mark read by the OCR ("I0007Q")
- The title page and opening pages before chapter 1, in 2 places
- The printed table of contents (the app makes its own)
- Specks between two lines of text, read by the OCR as "i/ O * J"
- The closing line "THE END."
- The printer's line (Morrison and Gibb, Edinburgh)
- The library's return slip and barcode (6 blocks)