The great need of this class is training for domestic life--by which I do not mean domestic service. Herein lies the only effective cure for the industrial and social miseries of the poor. The children are overworked, or else allowed to spend their time in a most dangerous idleness. That men should ask for an Eight Hours Bill when little girls of thirteen or fourteen may be found in our factories working ten hours seems unwise, if not selfish. Ten hours in a factory is not so wearing to a child as eight hours in school would be, but it is far too long. It makes education impossible, and leaves no room for surprise that married women in the poorest classes sink into a condition hardly above animalism. The two things which struck me most in East London were the amount of wasted intelligence and talent among the girls and the wretchedness of the married women. A secondary education in cooking, cleaning, baby management, laws of health, and English literature, should follow that of the Board School, and the minimum age at which full time may be worked should be gradually raised. By 1905 no one under sixteen should be working for an employer more than five hours a day, and all half-timers should be attending morning or afternoon school. The dock labourers’ wives, having learnt to be useful at home, would appreciate how much is lost by going out to work. Their withdrawal from the labour market and the increased efficiency of their children, brought about by better home management and education, would both tend to raise wages, provided that a trade union existed to secure that the workers should keep the result of their increased efficiency. Bad cooking, dirty habits, overcrowding, and empty-headedness are the sources of the drunkenness, inefficiency, immorality, and brutality which obstruct progress among so many of the poor, and philanthropic efforts can be better employed in this direction than in any other. During the last four years the trade union movement, for which Mrs. Paterson worked so unwearyingly and with such dishearteningly small success, has made considerable progress in East London amongst this group. The principal results to be expected from trade unionism amongst these workers are not sufficiently obvious for large numbers to be attracted by them. But even a small union can be most useful in guarding against reductions and in bringing public opinion to bear upon employers who allow their foremen to exercise tyranny and make unfair exactions from their workpeople. The usefulness of a trade union must be estimated in many cases by what it prevents from happening rather than by any positive advantage that it can be proved to have secured.