Cases of wrongful withholding of earnings, as for instance unfair fines, can be taken into the County Courts. In at least one district the secretary has successfully asserted the right to visit the mill and inspect cloth, when the employer claims deductions. The cotton weavers' secretaries have in fact to play a part not unlike that of the solicitor in other social grades. They have to look after their clients' interests, protect them from fraud and injury, and advise them in cases of doubt as to their legal rights and position. A fertile source of trouble is in bad cotton. Most of us have probably laughed over the story of the pious weaver in the cotton famine who prayed for supplies of raw material, "but, O Lord, not Surats!" The matter is far from amusing to the workers themselves. Every breakage of a thread means that their wages are stopped by so much, and defective material means that they have to work harder and with more harass and interruption, and accomplish less in the time. If inferior material is persistently supplied, the cotton-workers consider themselves entitled to an increase of 5 per cent or 7-1/2 per cent on earnings, and it is the secretaries' duty to get it for them. It is perhaps worth while to note the peculiar sense given in Lancashire speech to the expression "bad work." In Lancashire "bad work" means bad cotton, and is actually so used in the terms of an agreement between employer and employed as a subject for compensation to the worker. Constant anxious care is needed to safeguard the payment of wages. A Weavers' Local Association advises their members that "whenever the earned wages of a female or young person is being detained for being absent or leaving work, except to the amount of damage their employer has sustained in consequence, such a young person should at once lay their case before the Committee."[26] Even at the present time it is not unknown for a girl to be fined to the amount of a whole week's earnings, but, as my informant added, such a case is now rare. As a rule the Trade Union Secretary will be appealed to, will take the steps necessary, and the fine will be returned or considerably reduced. Any one who is used to considering the case of the girl and women worker in the unorganised trades of London or other great towns, any one who has read in the Women Factory Inspectors' Reports of the difficulty of enforcing the Truck Act and of the special proneness of the woman worker to be oppressed and cheated out of what is morally or even legally her due, will appreciate at once the extraordinary difference between her position and that of the cotton weaver who is backed up by her Association, and has an expert adviser to appeal to.