But the shop assistant is subject to rule during practically the whole of his or her working life; food, companions, dress, sleeping arrangements, hours of going to bed and of getting up, nay, the very medical man to be consulted in case of illness are thrust upon him without any choice of his own. The privilege, so dear to the natural man, of wearing an old coat and old slippers in the hours of relaxation, is not for the shop assistant; nor the modern diversion of experimenting with new and strange foods, nor the right of voting at elections, either municipal or parliamentary. The position combines, in short, the disagreeables of boarding school with those of domestic service, while failing to offer the pleasant features of either. It is indeed a moot point in my own mind whether it is not worse to be a shop assistant than a home worker, supposing the home worker to be a single woman. Personally, I would rather make cardboard boxes in silence and solitude, and buy for myself my own inferior bread and cheap tea. Chapter IV. brings us to the case of workers who are all men, who are engaged in a most necessary public service and employed for the most part by rich companies paying high dividends. Here the inexperienced would expect to find high wages and good conditions prevailing. In fact, however, we find, in the case of railway servants, that the hours of work imposed were so excessive as to constitute a public danger and to demand the intervention of the law. The drivers and conductors of trams and omnibuses have been shown to be in a large measure enslaved by the companies for which they work, their hours often cruelly long, their pay often reduced from a decent nominal to a quite inadequate actual wage, their conditions of work, in many cases, singularly oppressive and their liberty of passing into fresh employment, although not so completely barred as the railway servant’s, yet very seriously hampered and restricted. In short we behold a body of grown men, skilled and of good character, almost as unable as the isolated home worker to defend themselves against a strong and tyrannical employer.