The investigators of the Women’s Industrial Council visited personally nearly four hundred workers. Perhaps the very poorest trade investigated was matchbox-making, which, for the last fifteen years at least, has occupied some hundreds of workers in East London alone. The women fetch out from the factory or the middlewoman’s, strips of notched wood, packets of coloured paper and sandpaper, and printed wrappers; they carry back large but light bundles of boxes, tied up in packets of two dozen. Inside their rooms the boxes, made and unmade and half-made, cover the floor and fill up the lack of furniture. I have seen a room containing only an old bedstead in the very last stage of dirt and dilapidation, a table, and two deal boxes for seats. The floor and the window-sill were rosy with magenta matchboxes, while everything else, including the boards of the floor, the woodwork of the room and the coverings of the bed, was of the dark grey of ingrained dust and dirt. At first sight it is a pretty enough spectacle to see a matchbox made; one motion of the hands bends into shape the notched frame of the case, another surrounds it with the ready-pasted strip of printed wrapper, which, by long practice, is fitted instantly without a wrinkle, then the sandpaper or the phosphorus-paper, pasted ready beforehand, is applied and pressed on so that it sticks fast. A pretty high average of neatness and finish is demanded by most employers, and readers who will pass their matchboxes in review will seldom find a wrinkle or a loose corner of paper. The finished case is thrown upon the floor; the long narrow strip which is to form the frame of the drawer is laid upon the bright strip of ready-pasted paper, then bent together and joined by an overlapping bit of the paper; the edges of paper below are bent flat, the ready-cut bottom is dropped in and pressed down, and before the fingers are withdrawn they fold over the upper edges of the paper inside the top. Now the drawer, too, is cast on the floor to dry. All this, besides the preliminary pasting of wrapper, coloured paper and sandpaper, had to be done 144 times for 2¼d.; and even this is not all, for every drawer and case have to be fitted together and the packets tied up with hemp. Nor is the work done then, for paste has to be made before it can be used, and boxes, when they are ready, have to be carried to the factory. Let any reader, however deft, however nimble-fingered, consider how many hundred times a day he or she could manage to perform all these minute operations. But practice gives speed, especially when stimulated by the risk of starvation.