_Apprenticeship._--It seems appropriate here to give some little space to the subject of apprenticeship. Miss Dunlop points out, in her recent valuable work on that subject, that the opposition of some of the gilds to women's work was not hostility to women as women, so much as distrust of the untrained, unqualified worker. "At Salisbury the barber-surgeons agitated against unskilled women who medelled in the trade." "In the Girdlers' Company the officers forbade their members to employ foreigners and maids, not out of any animosity to the women, but because unscrupulous workmen had been underselling their fellows by employing cheap labour." At Hull, as we have seen, the employment of women was forbidden, but so was the employment of aliens. According to Miss Dunlop, the great difficulty in the way of women was the onerousness of domestic work, which prevented girls undertaking apprenticeship to a skilled craft. It appears that women and girls were largely employed as assistants to the husband or father, and that the requirement of apprenticeship by the Elizabethan Statute did not check the practice, as it was so widespread and so convenient that the law was difficult to enforce. It is exceptional, Miss Dunlop remarks, to find a gild forbidding the practice, and in point of fact, the services of his wife and daughter were usually the only cheap casual labour a man could get. Apprentice labour was cheap, but could not be obtained for short periods at a sudden pressure. "Girl labour, therefore, had a peculiar value, and we may suppose that more girls worked at crafts and manufactures than would have been the case if they had been obliged to serve an apprenticeship." There was no systematic training and technical teaching of girls as there was of boys, though in some cases they were apprenticed and served their time, and in others, though unapprenticed, they may have been as carefully taught. "But apprenticeship played no part in the life of girls as a whole: they missed the general education which it afforded, and their training tended to be casual and irregular": on the other hand, their lives gained something in variety from the change of passing from household to industrial work and _vice versa_. The system must, however, have tended to keep women in an inferior and subordinate position. "For although they worked hard and the total amount of their labour has contributed largely to our industrial development, it was only exceptionally that they attained to the standing of employers and industrial leaders." The exceptions are rather interesting; it is evident that London was broad-minded in its delimitation of the woman's sphere of activity and there were many instances of girls being apprenticed.