The peculiarity of household industry (in the technical sense of the term) is that it is carried out merely at the orders and not under the supervision of the contractor. The Imperial Industrial Code, more especially the _von Berlepsch_ Bill, in extending truck protection to household industry, understands this term to include all industrial workers engaged in the preparation of commodities under the direction of some firm or employer, but not working on the premises of their employers; and these workers may or may not be required to furnish the raw materials and accessories for their work. The home-workers carrying on this kind of preparation of commodities do so as a rule not in special work-rooms, but in their own dwelling-rooms or houses, or in little courtyards, sometimes in sheds and outhouses, sometimes even in the open air. For the rest, they may be either a few workers out of a family working on their own account, or a whole family working under the superintendence of one of its members. The most important characteristic of household industry is that it is work undertaken at the orders of a third party, therefore that it has no commercial independence, and takes no part in the sale of its products (characteristic _i_ of factory labour); and therefore obviously we have no occasion to consider the other characteristics _d_, _e_, _f_, _g_, _h_, in defining household industry. A distinction must be drawn between household industry carried on with or without the intervention of middlemen; for it takes a very different form, according to whether the arrangements between the industrial home-worker on the one side, and the giver of orders and provider of materials on the other, are made with or without the intervention of special agencies for ordering, supervising, collecting, and paying (commission agents, contractors, sweaters). The possible removal--or at least control and regulation--of the middleman forms one fundamental problem--hitherto unsolved--of labour protection in the sphere of household industry, and the protection of industrial home-workers against their parents and against each other forms another. _Family Industry._ Family industry to a great extent practically coincides with household industry, but not necessarily or entirely so; for family industry--meaning of course the work of preparing and manufacturing commodities--may be the preparation of goods for independent sale, not for sale by a third party in a shop or warehouse, and as a matter of fact this is very largely the case. Family industry sometimes even falls under the head of workshop labour (cf. Sec. 154 of the _von Berlepsch_ Bill). Its distinguishing characteristic is that it employs only workers belonging to the same family, hence the exact reverse of the Factory (see characteristic _a_). It includes all those industrial pursuits "in which the employer is served only by members of his own family" (Bill, Sec. 154, par. 3). II.--PERSONAL PROTECTION.