requires a scape-goat.  As we saw, many of the cases of sweating were found where there was a sub-contractor.  To our hasty vision, here seems to be the responsible party.  Forty years ago Alton Locke gave us a powerful picture of the wicked sub-contracting tailor, who, spider-like, lured into his web the unfortunate victim, and sucked his blood for gain.  The indignation of tender-hearted but loose-thinking philanthropists, short-visioned working-class orators, assisted by the satire of the comic journal, has firmly planted in the imagination of the public an ideal of an East London sweater; an idle, bloated middleman, whose expansive waistcoat is decorated with resplendent seals and watch-chains, who drinks his Champagne, and smokes his perfumed cigar, as he watches complacently the sunken faces and cowering forms of the wretched creatures whose happiness, health, and very life are sacrificed to his heartless greed.

Now a fair study of facts show this creature to be little else than a myth.  The miseries of the sweating den are no exaggeration, they are attested by a thousand reliable witnesses; but this monster human spider is not found there.  Though opinions differ considerably as to the precise status of the sweating middleman, it is evident that in the worst “sweating” trades he is not idle, and he is not rich.  In cases where the well-to-do, comfortable sub-contractor is found, he generally pays fair wages, and does not grossly abuse his power.  When the worst features of sweating are present, the master sweater is nearly always poor, his profits driven down by competition, so that he barely makes a living.  It is, indeed, evident that in many of the worst Whitechapel sweating-dens the master does not on the average make a larger income than the more highly paid of his machinists.  So, too, most of these “sweaters” work along with their hands, and work just as hard.  Some, indeed, have represented this sweating middleman as one who thrusts himself between the proper employer and the working man in order to make a gain for himself without performing any service.  But the bulk of evidence goes to show that the sweater, even when he does not occupy himself in detailed manual labour, performs a useful work of superintendence and management.  “The sweater in the vast majority of cases is the one man in the workshop who can, and does, perform each and any branch of the trade.”

For the old adage, which made a tailor the ninth part of a man, has been completely reversed by the subdivision of work in modern industry.  It now takes more than nine men to make a tailor.  We have foremen or cutters, basters, machinists, fellers, button-holers, pressers, general workers, &c.  No fewer than twenty-five such subdivisions have been marked in the trade.  Since the so-called tailor is no tailor at all, but a “button-holer” or “baster,” it is obvious that the working of such a system requires some one capable of general direction.