All these considerations are perfectly obvious and have often been urged before. But though I have known of many cases where moral evil has followed from bad housing conditions, I have known so many instances where in spite of bad housing conditions morality has been perfectly preserved, that I do not make so much of this point as some. I have yet to learn that morality is made safe by the most elaborate and healthy housing conditions. It is true that the level of morality is very low indeed in really overcrowded slums, but it also is true that the section of the population among which real purity is most common is the artisan section, and many of them have to contend with very poor housing conditions. The Royal Commission on Venereal Disease reported that while the class of casual laborers is the worst in the country, the next in the scale is the one described as "middle and upper classes". Traveling west in our cities does not mean traveling towards morality. _Sweating_ There are three main directions in which sweating tends to increase immorality. In the first place low wages paid to men make marriage very difficult, and sometimes impossible. And nothing could be worse for any community than that healthy and robust men should be debarred from marriage after twenty-one by purely material considerations. It is not impossible for a man to remain chaste through a lifetime of celibacy, but for all that a society that enforces celibacy on men against their will is making immorality a practical certainty. A particularly mean form of this evil occurs in connection with the living-in system which is imposed by a good many big shops on their employees. I used to know a number of young men of marriageable age who were housed in a great and bare sort of barracks and given in addition a wage that was only enough to provide dress and necessary etceteras. If, desiring to marry, they said that they wished to live out and to receive the equivalent of their board and lodging in money, they got in those pre-war days £18 a year extra. Is it to be wondered at that in that section of society it was a common saying that "only fools get married"? But it was not a chaste section of the community. Men are very seldom chaste when they live in exclusively male communities. Then, secondly, sweating makes for immorality because it means that girls are paid wages which are quite insufficient to support life. Some of them live at home with their parents and so get through, but those who have to support themselves become subjected to a terribly severe temptation to add to their starvation wages by the sale of themselves. It is still in this way that a considerable percentage of the prostitutes of the country is created, and the number of girls who, though not known as prostitutes, have sacrificed their purity because of financial pressure must be very great.