accommodation, lack of suitable sanitary and washing arrangements, and the like. But the emphasis of those who resist is not upon specific complaints. It is directed against a general system which herds men and women together, all of one class and one occupation, in unnatural contiguity, and leave them there, under regulations rather humiliating to adult persons, to make the best of life seen through distorted glasses, and from the inside of a regulated home. There are testimonies, indeed, of the excellence of the best, in perpetual care for the welfare of the employees. It is perhaps a misfortune that the comfort and kindliness of these best should throw an ægis of justification over a system which is the worst, and even in the average, stands on so many counts condemned. “Living-in,” declares the Report, in certain retail trades, is generally made a condition of employment, either express or implied. The board and lodging accommodation is often inferior and inadequate. Sleeping and other accommodation is frequently bad. On the moral side the system has often not only no advantage, but is actually harmful. The daily rush from counter to dining-room and back, the unappetising food, the wearying sameness of the menu, the insufficiency of the food, often supplemented by “extras” sold by the firm, like the “tuck shop” system of the English public school, are all described by actual sufferers, in experience which seems to have stepped clean out of the pages of _Kipps_ or _Vivian_. Five beds “invested with bugs in one room,” an attic in which three men sleep “that in the heat of summer smelt like a fowl-house,” beds with four clean sheets in six months, rooms with rats plentiful, bedrooms which open into corridors, the light being obtainable through a pane of glass in the wooden partitions--these and other similar experiences testify to the price which often has to be paid for the “moral supervision” which the young shopman or shop girl enjoys. The Report declares that in a number of cases at least this claim of moral supervision is cant--the old cant of cheapness; the cant in its revived form of the “moral supervision” of the workhouse children which were bought up in batches for the factories eighty years ago. An employer “would place no obstacle in the way of his male assistants marrying,” is the confession of one, “though,” he adds, “he certainly does not like his assistants to marry on an inadequate wage.” “Male and female created He them,” says Mr. Lewisham’s friend in a well-known novel, “which was d--d rough luck on assistant masters.” It would seem to be rough luck also on shop assistants who have the bad taste to prefer matrimony to moral guidance.