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 a