This has happily been changed by the object lesson presented by the Sweating Exhibition organised by _The Daily News_ last May and opened by the Princess Henry of Battenberg. That exhibition, held right in the heart of West London, visited by thirty thousand people, and commanding the attention of all serious students of our social system, brought the question instantly into the sphere of practical politics. Sweating was no longer a vague term concerning some more or less apocryphal wrongs. It was made real and actual. It was seen to be not an excrescence on the body politic, having no bearing upon its general health, but an organic disease. It was seen to be an evil not simply affecting some obscure lives in the mean streets of our cities, but an evil that wasted the whole industrial physique—a running sore that affected the entire fabric of society, a morass exhaling a miasma that poisoned the healthy elements of industry. Its spectre haunted not only the fever dens of the slums, but was present in the most costly garments of the most fashionable West-End shops, in the rich embroideries of the wealthy as well as in the household matchbox. Well dressed people who came with the comfortable belief that sweated goods were necessarily cheap goods realised with a shock that cheapness and sweating had no intrinsic relationship. They saw with more or less clearness that sweating reduced to its true meaning was not the oppression of the poor in the interests of the poor; but the effort of an uneconomic system to extract from the misery of the unorganised, ill-equipped worker the equivalent of organised, well paid and well equipped industry. It was the competition of flesh and blood with machinery. Sweating, it was seen, did not make goods cheap: it only made human life cheap. It did not benefit the consumer: it only benefited the man who set the slum to compete with the workshop, the man or more often the woman and the child to compete with the machine. It was seen that the evil lowered the whole vitality of industry. It preyed upon the defenceless and used them to depress the general industrial standard. It had no chance in a highly organised community, and found its victims in the hopeless and the broken, among the poor widows of the courts and alleys and all those who had lost heart in the battle and were sunk into the lowest depths of the social abyss.