ages and conditions are worse than they were twenty
years ago. Nor are these melancholy facts confined to any one country.
Sweating is not a peculiarity of Great Britain. Practically the same
trades experience the same evils in all other industrial countries.
France, Germany, Austria, and America reproduce with great exactness
under similar economic conditions the same social evils, and in those
countries, as in ours, Sweated Industries--by which I mean trades
where there is no organisation, where wages are exceptionally low, and
conditions subversive of physical health and moral welfare--cast dark
shadows in what is, upon the whole, the growing and broadening light
of civilisation.

There is a clear reason for this, which is in itself at once a
justification for the special treatment which we propose for these
trades, and a means of marking them off more or less definitely from
the ordinary trades. In the case of any great staple trade in this
country, if the rate of wages became unnaturally low compared to other
industries, and the workers could not raise it by any pressure on
their part, the new generation at any rate would exercise a preference
for better pay and more attractive forms of industry. The gradual
correction of depressed conditions over large periods of time is thus
possible. But in these sweated industries there is no new generation
to come to the rescue. They are recruited from a class rather than
from a section of the community. The widow, the women folk of the
poorest type of labourer, the broken, the weak, the struggling, the
diseased--those are the people who largely depend upon these trades,
and they have not the same mobility of choice, exerted, tardily though
it be, by a new generation, but which is undoubtedly operative upon
the great staple trades of the country. That is an explanation which
accounts for the same evils being reproduced under similar conditions
in different countries, separated widely from one another and marked
by great differences of general conditions.

I ask the House to regard these industries as sick and diseased
industries. I ask Parliament to deal with them exactly in the same
mood and temper as we should deal with sick people. It would be cruel
to prescribe the same law for the sick as for the sound. It would be
absurd to apply to the healthy the restrictions required for the sick.
Further, these sweated trades are not inanimate abstractions. They are
living, almost