They never complain until things have become intolerable. The anonymous complaints show the same percentage of justification as the signed. They work in unventilated workrooms. They are stinted of holidays. They are compelled to work overtime. They endure accident and disease. They are fined and cheated in innumerable ways. Their life is often confined to a mere routine of work and sleep. Yet they endure; and even at the heart of foul and impossible conditions retain always some rags of decency and honour. Some break loose from the accepted drudgery for a brief period of pleasure and idleness; to be found afterwards in the silent, stern discipline of the Rescue Home; where, says a Report, “the extreme youth of many of the inmates is a very distressing feature of many of the homes, and it is grievous that the sins of others should be so heavily visited upon these poor children, to whom the simple natural joys of home life are now denied.” Here austere virtue encourages “in some of the Scotch institutions,” where the hours of work are from eight to seven, “a poor dietary,” although “many of the inmates were young undeveloped girls.” But most are still resisting; as in the non-penitential laundries where “as a rule complaints are amply justified,” although “the workers still find it very difficult to summon up courage enough to speak the truth as to irregularities, from fear of the loss of employment, and consequent shortage of the necessities of life”; or in the “millinery workshop, with a large shop attached, in North London,” which ingeniously evades the factory law by combining operations of millinery apprentice with that of shop assistant, and “on my visiting one of the mothers of the girls she told me her young daughter still arrived home worn-out and crying with exhaustion”; or in the outworker’s home in the City of London, where a “young girl” is “making and elaborately trimming babies’ white silk bonnets beneath a ceiling black as ink, and walls with black and different coloured patches, looking as if some madman had found a pastime in scratching them,” and the girl spares “½d. for potash, and to the best of her ability washed and scraped the vermin from the walls.” Noting how clean and tidy she is in her own person, says the inspector, “I am not surprised to see the shudder with which she speaks of the struggle with dirt and filth.”