The movement of labour in the United States, as well as in this country, tends to confirm this view. =The Sweating System.=--Attention, perhaps, has been too much fixed upon certain incidents of the evolution of industry which, though important, are, as it were, branch lines, to have fully grasped the real economical trend of events. Amongst these is what is known as the sweating system. But the sweating system is, after all, but a kind of guerilla warfare carried on upon the flanks of the main engagement. You find it at its height in certain exceptional communities like London, where the cost of rent is so heavy as to make it more economical for the employer to let the worker pay the rent instead of himself. Again, the accumulation of human beings in a great centre like London is so vast that the purchaser of labour is in a position to compete with machinery without standing to lose. This is why the human pressure becomes so intolerable. It is a race in which the individual has to compete against organisation and machinery--usually under the most depressing conditions--in which the worker, without receiving any equivalent, carries a large responsibility, which, under organised industry, is discharged by the employer. It is only necessary to compare some great clothing factory where the sewing machines are driven by machinery, and work goes on in a well-lighted and airy building for a fixed number of hours daily at a fixed scale of payment, with the dirty and cramped rooms in Whitechapel or Stepney, which are rendered comfortless as a home by being turned into a workshop, in which a ruinous price is paid for the sewing machine bought on the hire system, and where there are no regular hours of work, but alternations of high pressure and protracted idleness, and finally where the rate of payment is a matter for constant haggling between the unfortunate worker and the middleman who gives out the clothes from the City warehouse to be made up--you have only to compare these two methods of industry to realise the real nature of the struggle, and the intolerable pressure to which the victim of high rents, abnormal density of population, and correspondingly low standard of equipment is subjected. The conclusions to be drawn from this brief survey seem to me to be not unimportant. In the first place, it is because labour has become so much lighter, and trades so much more easily learned, that the demand for women’s labour has grown so immensely of late years; in the second place, machinery, the great leveller, is tending to abolish rapidly such differences as have existed between men’s and women’s labour; and, in the third place, that whether legislation or organisation be attempted in the interests of the workers, it must embrace men and women alike.