the relatively unskilled labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who on 25s. a week or less has to support a wife and children and an appearance of respectability; the usher, who grinds out low-class instruction through the whole tedious day for less than the wage of a plain cook; the condition of these and many other kinds of low-class brain-workers is only a shade less pitiable than the “sweating” of manual labourers, and the causes, as we shall see, are much the same.  If our investigation of “sweating” is chiefly confined to the condition of the manual labourer, it is only because the malady there touches more directly and obviously the prime conditions of physical life, not because the nature of the industrial disease is different.

Sec. 3.  Leading “Sweating” Trades.—­It is next desirable to have some clear knowledge of the particular trades in which the worst forms of “sweating” are found, and the extent to which it prevails in each.  The following brief summary is in a large measure drawn from evidence furnished to the recent Lords’ Committee on the Sweating System.  Since the sweating in women’s industries is so important a subject as to demand a separate treatment, the facts stated here will chiefly apply to male industries.

Tailoring.—­In the tailoring trade the best kind of clothes are still made by highly-skilled and well-paid workmen, but the bulk of the cheap clothing is in the hands of “sweaters,” who are sometimes skilled tailors, sometimes not, and who superintend the work of cheap unskilled hands.  In London the coat trade should be distinguished from the vest and trousers trade.  The coat-making trade in East London is a closely-defined district, with an area of one square mile, including the whole of Whitechapel and parts of two adjoining parishes.  The trade is almost entirely in the hands of Jews, who number from thirty to forty thousand persons.  Recent investigations disclosed 906 workshops, which, in the quality and conditions of the work done in them, may be graded according to the number of hands employed.  The larger workshops, employing from ten to twenty-five hands or more, generally pay fair wages, and are free from symptoms of sweating.  But in the small workshops, which form about 80 per cent of the whole number, the common evils of the sweating system assert themselves—­overcrowding, bad sanitation, and excessive hours of labour.  Thirteen and fourteen hours are the nominal day’s work for men; and those workshops which do not escape the Factory Inspector assign a nominal factory day for women; but “among the imperfectly taught workers in the slop and stock trade, and more especially in the domestic workshops, under-pressers, plain machinists, and fellers are in many instances expected to ‘convenience’ their masters, i.e. to work for twelve or fifteen hours in return for ten or thirteen hours’ wage."[21] The better class workers, who require some skill, get comparatively high wages even in the smaller workshops,