I have spoken of the baby-farmers as masculine, but that was merely for convenience of metaphor. No doubt that the male sex have a considerable interest in the trade, but the negociators, and ostensibly the proprietors, are women. As I write, one of the said newspapers lies before me. It is a daily paper, and its circulation, an extensive one, is essentially amongst the working classes, _especially amongst working girls and women_. The words italicised are worthy particular attention as regards this particular part of my subject. Here is a daily newspaper that is mainly an advertising broadsheet. It is an old-established newspaper, and its advertisement columns may be said fairly to reflect the condition of the female labour market over vast tracts of the London district. Column after column tells of the wants of servants and masters. “Cap-hands,” “feather-hands,” “artificial flower-hands,” “chenille-hands,” hands for the manufacture of “chignons” and “hair-nets” and “bead work,” and all manner of “plaiting” and “quilling” and “gauffering” in ribbon and net and muslin, contributing towards the thousand and one articles that stock the “fancy” trade. There are more newspapers than one that aspire as mediums between employers and employed, but this, before all others, is _the_ newspaper, daily conned by thousands of girls and women in search of work of the kind above mentioned, and it is in this newspaper that the baby-farmer fishes wholesale for customers. I write “wholesale,” and surely it is nothing else. To the uninitiated in this peculiar branch of the world’s wickedness it would seem that, as an article of negociation, a baby would figure rarer than anything, and in their innocence they might be fairly guided to this conclusion on the evidence of their personal experience of the unflinching love of parents, though never so poor, for their children; yet in a single number of this newspaper published every day of the week and all the year round, be it borne in mind, appear no less than _eleven_ separate advertisements, emanating from individuals solicitous for the care, weekly, monthly, yearly—anyhow, of other people’s children, and that on terms odorous of starvation at the least in every meagre figure.