The development of the single young woman's position through the factory system has been obscured by the abuses incidental to that system, which were due more or less to historical causes outside industry. The absence of any system of control over industrial and sanitary conditions undoubtedly left many factories to become centres of disease, overwork and moral corruption, and the victims of this misgovernment and neglect are a reproach that can never be wiped out. On the other hand, later experience has shown that decent conditions of work are easier to secure in factories than in small work places, owing to greater publicity and facility for inspection. The very fact of the size of the factory, its economic importance, and its almost dramatic significance for social life, caused attention to be drawn to, and wrath to be excited by, evil conditions in the factory, which would have been little noticed in ordinary small work places. The initiation of the "great industry" resulted in a kind of searchlight being turned on to the dark places of poverty. State interference had to be undertaken, although in flat opposition to the dominant economics of the day, and the better sort of masters were impelled by shame or worthier motives to get rid of the stigma that clung to factory employment. Now the girl-worker has profited by this movement in a quite remarkable degree. Domestic service is no longer her only outlook, and the conditions of domestic service have probably considerably improved in consequence. Her employment is no longer bound up with personal dependence on her own family, or personal servitude in her employer's. The wage contract, though not, we may hope, the final or ideal stage in the evolution of woman's economic position, is an advance from her servile state in the mediaeval working class, or parasitic dependence on the family. The transition thus endows her with greater freedom to dispose of or deny herself in marriage, and is an important step towards higher racial ideals and development. Grievously exploited as her employment has been and still is, the evolution of the woman wage-earner, her gradual achievement of economic individuality and independence, in however limited a degree, is certainly one of the most interesting social facts of the time. The remarkable intelligence and ability of Lancashire working people was noticed by Mrs. Gaskell in _Mary Barton_, as long ago as 1848. And to this day the Co-operative Movement and the Trade Union Movement flourish among Lancashire women as they do not anywhere else. The Workers' Educational Association draws many of its best students from these women who toil their ten hours in the mill and use their brains for study in the evening after work is over. CHAPTER III. STATISTICS OF THE LIFE AND EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN.