a place at the London Docks called the cage, a sort of pen fenced off by iron railings.  I have seen three hundred half-starved dockers crowded round this cage, when perhaps a ganger would appear wanting three hands, and the awful struggle of these three hundred famished wretches fighting for that opportunity to get two or three hours’ work has left an impression upon me that can never be effaced.  Why, I have actually seen them clambering over each other’s backs to reach the coveted ticket.  I have frequently seen men emerge bleeding and breathless, with their clothes pretty well torn off their backs.”  The competition described in this picture only differs from other competitions for low-skilled town labour in as much as the conditions of tender gave a tragical concentration to the display of industrial forces.  This picture, exaggerated as it will appear to those who have not seen it, brings home to us the essential character of free competition for low-skilled labour where the normal supply is in excess of the demand.  If other forms of low-skilled labour were put up to be scrambled for in the same public manner, the scene would be repeated ad nauseam.  But because the competition of seamstresses, tailors, shirt-finishers, fur-sewers, &c., is conducted more quietly and privately, it is not less intense, not less miserable, and not less degrading.  This struggle for life in the shape of work for bare subsistence wages, is the true logical and necessary outcome of free competition among an over supply of low-skilled labourers.

Sec. 3.  The Multiplication of “Small Masters.”—­Having made so much progress in our analysis, we shall approach more intelligently another important aspect of the “sweating system.”  Mr. Booth and other investigators find the tap-root of the disease to consist in the multiplication of small masters.  The leading industrial forces of the age, as we have seen, make for the concentration of labour in larger and larger masses, and its employment in larger and larger factories.  Yet in London and in certain other large centres of population, we find certain trades which are still conducted on a small scale in little workshops or private houses, and those trades furnish a very large proportion of the worst examples of “sweating.”  Here is a case of arrested development in the evolution of industry.  It is even worse than that; for some trades which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system, have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and broken up again into smaller units.  The increased proportion of the clothing industries conducted in private houses and small workshops is the most notorious example.  This applies not only to East London, but to Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and other large cities, especially where foreign labour has penetrated.  For a large proportion of the sweating workshops, especially in clothing trades, are supported by foreign labour.  In Liverpool during the last ten years the substitution of home-workers for workers in tailors’ shops has been marked, and in particular does this growth of home-workers apply to women.