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 assign a nominal factory day for women; but "among the imperfectly taught workers in the slop and stock trade, and more especially in the domestic workshops, under-pressers, plain machinists, and fellers are in many instances expected to 'convenience' their masters, i.e. to work for twelve or fifteen hours in return for ten or thirteen hours' wage."[21] The better class workers, who require some skill, get comparatively high wages even in the smaller workshops, though the work is irregular; but the general hands engaged in making 1s. coats, generally women, get a maximum of _1s. 6d._, and a minimum which is indefinitely below 1s. for a twelve hours' day. This low-class work is also hopeless. The raw hand, or "greener" as he is called, will often work through his apprenticeship for nominal wages; but he has the prospect of becoming a machinist, and earning from 6s. to 10s. a day, or of becoming in his turn a sweater. The general hand has no such hope. The lowest kind of coat-making, however, is refused by the Jew contractor, and falls to Gentile women. These women also undertake most of the low-class vest and trousers making, generally take their work direct from a wholesale house, and execute it at home, or in small workshops. The price for this work is miserably low, partly by reason of the competition of provincial factories, partly for reasons to be discussed in a later chapter. Women will work for twelve or fifteen hours a day throughout the week as "trousers finishers," for a net-earning of as little as 4s. or 5s. Such is the condition of inferior unskilled labour in the tailoring trade. It should however be understood that in "tailoring," as in other "sweating"