“Sweating”—General interpretation of the term—Work in the worker’s home—Some special investigations—Characteristics of home work—Match box making—The process—The payment—History of the Jarvis family—Shirt making—Some individual cases—Paper-bag making—Some cases—Some men home workers—Racquet balls—The process—The payment—Health of home workers—The married woman and the single woman as home workers—Brushmaking—Mrs Hogg’s description—Tooth brushes—Other trades and rates of pay—Home work, underpayment, and high priced goods. The term “sweating,” to which at one time the notion of sub-contract was attached, has gradually come to be applied to almost any method of work under which workers are extremely ill paid or extremely overworked; and the “sweater” means nowadays “the employer who cuts down wages below the level of decent subsistence, works his operatives for excessive hours, or compels them to toil under insanitary conditions.” It is in this wide general sense that the word will be employed in these pages; and the first part of this volume will be devoted to showing how wide-spread is the prevalence of sweating throughout the whole field of British industry. Probably the most completely wretched workers in our country may be found among those who ply their toil in their own poor homes. It is by no means the case that all home work is sweated; but it is the fact that a good deal of home work, in this country and in others, exists solely because the home worker can be ground down to the lowest stage of misery. As an acute French observer writes:— “Home work, or at least an important fraction of that industry, is in the odd condition of only surviving on account of its evils. Low pay and long hours of work are among the chief conditions of its existence.”[1] Into the conditions of women workers in this branch of industry—which, however, is by no means confined to women—the Women’s Industrial Council made an investigation, published in 1897.[2] Two inquiries were also made by Miss Irwin, in Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades; and particulars as to the home work of women in Birmingham appear in _Women’s Work and Wages_.[3] All these records exhibit much the same features: unremitting toil, a high degree of mechanical speed and accuracy, and at the same time the lowest standard of workmanship that will pass muster; above all, a cruelly heavy burden resting on the shoulders of the woman who tries to be at the same time mother, housekeeper, and bread-winner, and who in return for her endless exertion seldom receives enough even to keep her properly fed, and never enough to satisfy her own very modest standard of comfort.