=White Lead.=--We come now to consider some of the effects caused by working poisonous materials. Foremost among these come the trades into which lead enters. By some strange and perverse fate the manufacture of this deadly commodity is, so far as this country is concerned, undertaken largely by women. This is due in a great part to the fact that their labour can be procured more cheaply than that of men, and that the operations in which they are engaged require but little skill or training. In the white lead works of Newcastle, Sheffield, and East London the women are employed in carrying heavy weights on their heads, climbing ladders while loaded in the same way, and in fact in performing those operations which are usually done by means of trucks and hoists and other mechanical appliances. Anyone who has watched the white-lead women passing backwards and forwards in their long, weary trampings under their heavy loads, clambering up and down the ladders, or passing the lead from hand to hand up a staging beside the stoves where it has to be heated, must realise how thoroughly retrograde in its tendency, as well as mischievous in its physical and moral effects, is the existence of a class of cheap and unresisting labour which the manufacturer can bend into any shape, or turn to any purpose that he chooses. The most ardent advocates of perfect freedom for women in matters industrial will scarcely defend the system of transport, and transport of a highly poisonous material, which depends upon the cheap supply of women’s heads, or the system of elevators which is kept up in the same fashion.