Mr. Booth and other
investigators find the tap-root of the disease to consist in the
multiplication of small masters. The leading industrial forces of the
age, as we have seen, make for the concentration of labour in larger and
larger masses, and its employment in larger and larger factories. Yet in
London and in certain other large centres of population, we find certain
trades which are still conducted on a small scale in little workshops or
private houses, and those trades furnish a very large proportion of the
worst examples of "sweating." Here is a case of arrested development in
the evolution of industry. It is even worse than that; for some trades
which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system,
have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and
broken up again into smaller units. The increased proportion of the
clothing industries conducted in private houses and small workshops is
the most notorious example. This applies not only to East London, but to
Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and other large cities, especially where
foreign labour has penetrated. For a large proportion of the sweating
workshops, especially in clothing trades, are supported by foreign
labour. In Liverpool during the last ten years the substitution of home-
workers for workers in tailors' shops has been marked, and in particular
does this growth of home-workers apply to women.

A credible witness before the Lords' Committee stated that "at the
present moment it would be safe to say that two-thirds of the sweaters
in Liverpool are foreigners," coming chiefly from Germany and Russian
Poland. In Leeds sixteen years ago there were only twelve Jewish
workshops; there are now some hundreds.

Since a very large proportion of the worst sweating occurs in trades
where the work is given out, either directly or by the medium of sub-
contract, to home-workers, it is natural that stress should be laid upon
the small private workshops as the centre of the disease. If the work
could only be got away from the home and the small workshop, where
inspection is impracticable, and done in the factory or large workshop,
where limitations of hours of labour and sanitary conditions could be
enforced, where the force of public opinion could secure the payment of
decent wages, and where organization among workers would be possible,
the worst phases of the malady would disappear. The abolition of the
small workshop is the great