The preceding chapters do not profess to give anything like a general survey of the whole field of British labour. It has seemed wise for many reasons to confine myself to aspects with which I am, in a greater or less degree, personally familiar; and therefore the work of women, and of London women especially, looms rather large. But I hope that I have shown, by a sufficient range of instances, certain general truths. In trade after trade, men, women and children are exhibited working in the conditions which are indicated, comprehensively but vaguely, by the term “sweating.” We have seen the dwelling of the home worker robbed of every feature that makes a home, its narrow space littered with match boxes, or with shirts or trousers or paper-bags—in any case transformed into one of the most comfortless of workshops. In some homes the rattle of the sewing machine forms a ceaseless accompaniment to the whole course of family life; in others, meals, such as they are, are eaten in the immediate neighbourhood of the glue pot or the paste pot; the smell of new cloth, the dust and fluff of flannelette pervade the room of the “finisher”; damp paper-bags or damp cardboard boxes lie piled on beds; home, parents and children are all subservient to unintermittent and most unremunerative labour. One step, but only one step, higher comes the factory “hand.” We have seen girls filling pots with boiling jam, carrying to and fro heavy trays and stacking these trays in piles, two together raising, sometimes to above the height of their own heads, trays some of which weigh well over half a hundredweight. We have seen them, even when their work was not in itself heavy, worn out by the rapidity with which they repeat endlessly, day after day, and week after week, operations of mechanical monotony. Some glimpse has been given of those horrible intervals in which the semistarvation of “full work” gives place to the acute privation of “slack time.” The dangers, discomforts, hardships and exactions that must be borne if an employer chooses to inflict them, have been indicated, though but very inadequately; and the example of laundries and jam factories has served to suggest how far worse yet would be the conditions of factory operatives if the law did not intervene for their protection.