the great commercial truth that shops exist not to supply the needs of the public but to fill the pockets of the shopkeeper. Nor is the premium the only instrument of pressure applied to the shop assistant. There is, in most establishments, an unwritten law that each assistant must, each week, sell goods to a certain amount. That total goes by the name of the “book”; and each young man and young woman is aware that repeated failure to “take” his or her “book” will be followed by dismissal. One very capable employer has a different method. He engages the assistant at a fixed salary; and when she has been at work for a couple of months, she is informed that for the future her salary will be diminished by a substantial deduction, and that she will receive a commission of 1¼ per cent. upon her sales. The assistants are said not to keep a reckoning of their commission, but to be of opinion that they rather gain than lose. In the “wools” department, where sales would not generally run to high figures, £10 was deducted from the £30 a year of one assistant, and £8 from the £28 of another. From a salary of £35 in the underclothing showroom, no less than £23 was taken off. There are houses in which a list of weekly “takings” is posted up; and some in which the names that stand low in the list are marked by the employer with signs of disapprobation. To be a good salesman or saleswoman is to be an adept in the art of inducing fellow creatures to make purchases that they did not intend to make. Indeed, there are shops where failure to effect a sale, if it occurs three times running, means dismissal. I knew an instance (a good many years ago) in which a girl was dismissed at a moment’s notice from a London millinery shop, because she had failed to cajole a customer into buying any bonnet. She was “living-in”; her home was not in London; the dismissal took place between 5 and 6 o’clock, and she did not know of any lodging to which she could go. Fortunately a policeman whom she consulted was able to direct her to one of London’s many safe havens for young women. But what of the employer, who, suddenly, and late in the day, turned a young girl out of his house into the unknown world of London, her only fault being that another woman had found in his shop no bonnet to suit her—and had been resolute enough to resist buying one that did not?