Holmes, “that I have found them to be the most industrious, sober, and honest class of the community that it has been my lot ever to meet with; in fact, their goodness appals me.” Here, indeed, are the examples, at length realised in the flesh, of the workings of the “laws” of the older political economy: the “iron law of wages” driving, through the frantic competition for employment by the workers against each other, those wages down to the minimum of existence. “I know one widow,” is the testimony, “who is working, and has done nothing else than work, at these little things at her own home in Bethnal Green for forty years, and her payment for that work now is practically the same as it was at the beginning of that period. Her fingers have got stiffer, and she cannot earn quite so much now.” “It is the apathy of the people”--after forty years of it--one witness complains, “engaged in all these things, and their helplessness which forms the greatest obstacle to their advancement.” These apathetic classes, indeed, appear largely as those for whom petitions are presented in the Christian Church for special and peculiar mercies--“women labouring with child; sick persons; young children.” And the reply to the petition is this Home work, falling as the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath, and blessing him that gives and him that takes: obtained “by sending boy or girl to the city for the stuff with a more or less dilapidated, cast-off perambulator, which they push home full up with shirts or mantles or skirts, which are taken back to the warehouse when finished.” The actual workers appear before the Committee in kindly anonymity, having little violence of protest against Providence, the employers, or themselves. The tendency of payments, they are compelled to confess on examination, have steadily gone down; that is because “women are always applying for work, and they have no work to give them; and therefore they cut the prices down, because the women go and beg for work.” The “expenses” of each of two workers sharing a room, “without the rent,” are one shilling and threepence a week. “Do you have a fire in this room?” is asked. “No,” is the reply; “we light a lamp to warm ourselves.” The difficulty of the Committee, in examination of wages budgets, was to find any margin at all for food and firing; a difficulty which the witnesses were unable to remove. Prices, confesses one, “have come down ever so much; they have come down in the last four years so that I cannot keep myself now.” “It is almost a mystery,” is the challenge to another, “how you manage to live at all.” Yet others do well, earning (in one case) ten shillings a week--for work between “fifteen and sixteen hours a day”--sometimes up at six o’clock, and “I work till ten at night.” These, however, are the limited hours of a “very quick” worker. “Can you suggest anything,” is the forlorn inquiry to one of them, “that anybody could do for you which would induce your master, or