And the alternatives--especially for the women--are not all so promising that they can afford lightly to forego the advantage here offered of assured food and shelter. Far below is a vision of pitiful poverty, into which, at any time, any unfortunate worker may be precipitated; rarely, henceforth, ever to rise into the clear air of intelligible life. Somewhere festering at the basis, round the foundations of the great mansion of England’s economic supremacy, are to be discovered the workers of the “Sweated Trades.” At intervals of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down, to scrape up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions, Committees of the House of Commons, or the House of Lords. It is always the same there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life upon the margin below which life ceases to endure. The sensational novelist utters his study in fiction, the cause and the remedy; the public conscience is stirred by the exhibitions of “sweated” goods and “sweated” women: after a time distraction intervenes, a war, a colonial football or cricket tour, ecclesiastical dispute over posture of praying, or colour of garment. The sweated workers, for one moment indecently revealed in the sunshine, return again to the welcome obscurity of their twilight world. A recent House of Commons Committee has once more raked over the bottom; examined, with blinking eyes, the strange things found there; reported in favour of Government action. The evidence is of the monotonous simplicity familiar to all similar investigations. “My attention,” says Mr. Holmes, the police court missionary, “was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago. I met two or three widows at the police court, charged with attempted suicide, and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes, and became aware of the conditions under which they lived; the prices paid for their work, the hours they generally worked, the amount of rent they paid, the kind of food they ate, and everything of that description. On one occasion I took three widows for a holiday. Each of them had attempted suicide, and was broken down in health of mind and body through hard work and poor food. The story of their lives, their manner, their appearance, and their broken spirit was a revelation.” The broken spirit, indeed, so characteristic of those who, from the beginning, have enlisted in the service of fourteen hours’ work a day, does not appear entirely to have brought the felicity which--in orthodox views--accompanies a docile and grateful working-class population. Nor does the complete absence of Trades Unions--those “cruel organisations”--appear to have effected that “economic liberty” which the supporters of “Free Labour” endeavour to obtain by the smashing of these instruments of tyranny. “My experience of ten years is this,” says Mr.