Dilke, Miss Routledge, Miss Holyoake, and others, have visited most of the manufacturing districts of England and Scotland, and have even carried their missionary enterprise as far as Belfast, where, since the Trades Congress of 1893 great efforts have been made to organise the labour of the women working in the linen and flax mills. Many of the unions thus formed are affiliated to the League, including a number in Scotland and the large mixed union of West Riding Power-Loom Weavers, who have joined the League as far as their women members are concerned. Recently a further step has been taken, by sending out working women who have had experience in their own unions, as organisers into districts where new unions are being formed; and it is expected that this plan will be found extremely useful, as women who are already overworked and underpaid have little strength or leisure for arranging the preliminaries of organisation. =Difficulties of Combination.=--The difficulty of forming unions among women is undeniably great. Women are inexperienced in combination, and they entertain a lively and by no means groundless fear of the resentment of their employers. Unionism does not, it is true, often meet with opposition from the better class of employers, who recognise in it a salutary check on the efforts of unscrupulous rivals to force down both prices and wages. Experience shews them, too, that unionism discourages rather than fosters strikes, and in cases of difficulty they would often prefer to deal with the accredited representatives of the workpeople. But in many cases the attempt to form a combination among women meets with the open hostility of their employers. It is not uncommon for a woman who has undertaken the secretaryship of a union to be summarily dismissed. The manager of a confectionery factory in a large provincial town recently attempted to turn away all those who had given in their names to a newly-formed union. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that women, especially in the worst paid trades, are afraid to join a trade union, and that even after joining they readily fall away from an undertaking which may possibly involve so serious a risk. If working women throughout the country were dominated by this fear the cause of unionism would be hopeless; but fortunately this is not the case, and we can only admire the courage which enables women earning a miserable pittance to risk its loss by identifying themselves with an unpopular movement. If the union were strong it would of course set its face against arbitrary dismissals, which are in themselves a powerful argument in favour of organisation; but the difficulty is to prevent their occurrence during the early years of the union. On this account it is useful, where possible, to collect a fund for the relief of women who may be temporarily thrown out of work owing to their active connection with a trade union; and