Not the least disquieting revelation that emerged from the Exhibition and the lectures which accompanied it was the bearing of the evil upon our collective life. The sweated reacted upon the community. It was seen that they not only lowered the industrial standard: they were a menace to the communal good, a drain upon the resources of society in the interests of the people who exploited them. They provided a reserve of incredibly cheap labour which the community had to subsidise from the rates. Having no power of combination or resistance they were beaten down by the employer far below the barest means of subsistence, and the task of keeping them alive was left to the public. This was the case even when they were employed; but in many instances the work was seasonal and subject to long periods of unemployment. Then their whole existence depended upon a mingling of pauperism and charity until a fresh demand for their labour sprang up, and the public purse was relieved of some portion of the task of keeping them alive. It was seen, in short, that sweating meant the maintenance out of the rates of a vast mass of low class labour which enabled the sweater to compete successfully with high class labour. Many of the complaints of high rates in the East End for example came from the very firms whose high dividends were actually being paid out of the rates in the form of poor relief to the underpaid worker. The bearing of the evil upon child life was made equally clear. It was not merely that the children of the sweated were ill-nourished and ill-clad. They were made to take their share in the incessant struggle for food. They too became competitors with healthy industry, and by increasing the family output actually served to still further lower the starvation wages. For in this social morass there is no minimum. The excess of labour is so great and the demand for food so urgent that the tendency is constantly downward. It is a fight for bread in which the sweater plays off the dire misery of these against the deeper misery of those. And in this struggle the child life of the slums is used as a counter in the game and a new generation of the physically unfit and socially dead springs up like rank weeds to choke the hope and effort of the future. Finally, it was made clear that sweating is the enemy of the development of industry. It makes it possible to extract from the necessities of the poor what ought to be extracted from highly developed processes. It checks the natural evolution of commercial effort by an uneconomic substitute. Mr Sidney Webb states this point with much force in his “Industrial Democracy” when he says: