In the annual Reports of the Factory Inspectors, for example, he can see the result of occasional complaints, of sporadic surprise visits; with imagination he can extend these revelations over widening areas of submerged life. These summaries appear as the letting down of dredges into the depth and the bringing to light of the things which exist far below the surface. They are records of the daily and hourly warfare of the embodied conscience of the community against human fear and human greed. That conscience, working through a great machinery of protected law, is endeavouring to guard the men and women and children of the nation against the more outrageous forms of destruction: against the readiness with which the Fear of Destitution is pressing them into all forms of distorted, intolerable, poisonous pursuits. The laws are passed, the inspectors appointed, then the nation turns to other interests in confidence that all is well. Such confidence is based upon an altogether inadequate estimate of the two strongest impulses in the life of man. Avarice can usually overcome terror. Fear acting against greed is occasionally triumphant. But when the two are operating in unison, the result is as the letting out of water. In every trade there are those who will supplant their neighbours by the cheapening of the cost, the lengthening of hours, the avoidance of appliances. In every city there is the unlimited supply of disorganised women’s and children’s labour, which sees before it no alternative but of a quick or of a prolonged decay. The will to live still resists all efforts to render human desire impossible. The apathy of the East, accumulated through centuries of oppression, has not yet infected the industrial life of the West. So the unequal strife continues, between the attempt to raise these broken people into some semblance of rational and humane existence, and the pressure which drives them to choke themselves with dust, and poison themselves with noxious vapour, and ravage into collapse and ruin the bodies and souls of women and children.