literature of the eighteenth century is to be trusted, the same form of good manners was far from being universal among those swearing country gentlemen who were the great grandfathers of our smooth spoken generation.[57] The factory girl’s code of honour is curiously like that of the school boy. In no circumstances will she denounce a companion. To the governor or to the forewoman she will lie freely if occasion demands. To those whom she recognises as allies, she is truth itself. I do not recall one single instance, in disputes between workers and employers, in which the tale told by working girls has not been proved true in every detail. With employers, I am sorry to say, this has often been by no means the case. Two qualities, in particular, mark the factory girl of from sixteen to twenty: her exuberant spirits and energy, and the invariable improvement in manner and language that follows upon any sort of amelioration in her position. To watch the rapid development of refinement and gentleness consequent upon joining a good club is to feel how sound is the national character and how lamentable the yearly waste of admirable human material. A few years pass, a very few, and these bright girls become apathetic, listless women of whom at 35 it is impossible to guess whether their age is 40 or 50. They are tired out; they toil on, but they have ceased to look forward or to entertain any hopes. The contrast between the factory girl and her mother is perhaps the very saddest spectacle that the labour world presents. To be the wife of a casual labourer, the mother of many children, living always in too small a space and always in a noise, is an existence that makes of too many women, in what ought to be the prime of their lives, mere machines of toil, going on from day to day, with as little hope and as little happiness as the sewing machine that furnishes one item in their permanent weariness. We ascend another step and come to the shop assistants, the clerks and the waitresses in restaurants. We find that these dapper young men and trim young women whose hands and faces are so much cleaner and whose speech and manners are so much smoother than those of the factory worker, are scarcely better off in the matter of pay, and often absolutely worse off in the matter of working conditions. The factory worker is at least free after the factory closes, and, except in laundries, the law generally succeeds in bringing down the hours of work to something near a reasonable limit.