week.” This lady was evidently not aware that piece work is not a state “ultimately attained,” but the usual system throughout the establishment. Nearly all—probably, indeed, every one—of those 190 pay sheets represented piece work wages. Upon the basis of this illusory wage of 24s. and upwards the writer proceeded to compare the payment of confectionery “hands” with that of High School mistresses, forgetting, however, to compare the hours of a school with those of a factory, or to deduct those slack seasons to which the confectionery trade is so sadly liable. A High School mistress, moreover, works forty weeks in the year and is paid by the year; a confectionery worker often works for less than forty weeks in the year, and since she is paid by the week her blank weeks are blank to her exchequer, so that even if she did earn £1 a week (which she does not) she would not earn £52 a year. Seasonality—the word is so useful that it must be admitted—though it falls one degree less heavily upon the factory worker than upon the worker at home, is to her too a terrible evil. The long “slack times” of the West-End tailor or tailoress reduce a wage that looks handsome in a pay sheet of May or June to a very meagre annual income; and many a West End dressmaker who has worked overtime—as often as not without extra pay—through the long hot evenings of the London season finds herself, in January or February, shivering, without work or pay, beside her own empty grate. Long hours, which are in effect one form of low wages, have been checked by the Factory Acts, but not yet ended. The inspector for West London writes: “The Jew tailor of West London has an idea that seven days a week is not too long to work his hands.”[8] From Birmingham a case is reported of a Christmas card maker, who had already been cautioned for keeping “female young persons,” _i.e._ girls under eighteen, at work till 9 of an evening. He was found to be keeping two women and a girl at work till 6.15 on Saturday, a day on which work should, by law, end early, and was said to be keeping his hands at work on Sundays also—a privilege which the law allows only to the laundry proprietor. “On the succeeding Sunday,” writes the inspector, “the place was inspected, but with difficulty. It was only after considerable delay that admittance was obtained, and then, although the place had every appearance that work had been going on, no females were found. The upper parts of the premises were in use as residence, and I had reason to think that women had been sent up there upon my arrival, but the occupier would not allow me to go up. It has subsequently been admitted that eight women and two female young persons were at work and hidden as suspected.”[9]