“Isn’t the remedy Protection?” was a question frequently heard at the lectures given at the Exhibition. Most of us would agree with Mr Bernard Shaw who, in answering such a question, said he would be ready to protect our industry against sweated competition. But the general operation of Protection would be wholly in the interest of the sweater. It would put a new premium upon his vocation. And the fact remains that sweating is more rampant in protected countries even than in our own. It was the Berlin Exhibition which suggested the _Daily News_ Exhibition, and since that event there has been an exhibition in Philadelphia which has shown that the horrors of sweating in Protectionist America go deeper even than those in Free Trade England. And it is three of our Protectionist colonies which, realising the social menace of this trade in misery, have indicated the true path of reform. They have realised that the community must protect not only the individual but itself against a traffic which is slavery in the thinnest disguise, and which is not only cruel to the individual but destructive of honest industry and ruinous to social health. The policy which Australia has applied holds the field as the one effective remedy discovered for dealing with this appalling social evil. The victims cannot protect themselves. They are beyond the reach of organisation. In their isolation and poverty they have no defence against the raids of the conscienceless sub-contractor who is as literal a slave-driver as any who ever wielded a whip in the cotton fields, a slave-driver none the less because his whip is hunger instead of thongs. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, How shall your loop’d and window’d raggedness defend you From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en Too little care of this. It is the State alone which can take care of them, protect them against the rapacity of the oppressor and, in protecting them, protect itself also. For this is primarily not a problem for pity; but a duty to the commonwealth. No Society can be sound in health which has at its base this undrained morass of wretchedness—a morass which charity and the cold mercy of the Poor Law only develop and which social justice can alone drain dry. PART I SWEATED INDUSTRY CHAPTER I THE POOREST OF ALL