The objects of this Society are stated to be: "To maintain and protect the rights and privileges of the trade and to grant relief to such members as may be out of work, or afflicted with illness." The subscription is 2_d._ per week, and an entrance fee of 1_s._ is imposed. It can hardly be expected that a Society whose membership has probably never exceeded 270, could have much fighting force. But agitation has never been the policy of the Society. It has refused to join with the men in making demands upon the employers; its representatives at Trade Union Congresses and elsewhere have steadily resisted legal restrictions upon labour; it has not shown itself anxious to seize what the men regarded as opportunities to make itself felt.[24] [Footnote 24: In 1891 the women's Society refused to support the men's in agitating for an eight-hours' day. In 1875 Mrs. Paterson said at the Trade Union Congress that "the more they pressed for additional legislation the greater obstacles they threw in the way of working women. She should rather say let them suffer a little longer the evils of overwork and long hours." The Union's representatives, however, have always pressed for women factory inspectors, and on this matter Mrs. Paterson was for a good many years a voice crying in the wilderness.] Perhaps the Union has been too willing to make requests to good employers for better conditions, and too timorous in helping to level up the general conditions of the trade. Employers have not been hostile. Mr. B. Collins, the publisher, for instance, presided over the annual meeting for 1891, and Mr. Longmans and other publishers have done the same in other years. "I know an employer," says a writer in the _British Bookmaker_ of September, 1891, "who will give £100 to see a good women's Union established. Why? Because if it could be done, its effect upon other employers would remove the gross inequalities of prices that at present exist to his detriment." But this Union has never reached that point of strength when it could bring pressure to bear on the trade for the mutual advantage of the good employer and the woman worker. As a consequence, the good relations between the men and the women in the trade have not always been maintained, and there was considerable ill-feeling between the two sections during the eight hours' agitation from 1891 to 1894.[25]