A credible witness before the Lords’ Committee stated that “at the present moment it would be safe to say that two-thirds of the sweaters in Liverpool are foreigners,” coming chiefly from Germany and Russian Poland.  In Leeds sixteen years ago there were only twelve Jewish workshops; there are now some hundreds.

Since a very large proportion of the worst sweating occurs in trades where the work is given out, either directly or by the medium of sub-contract, to home-workers, it is natural that stress should be laid upon the small private workshops as the centre of the disease.  If the work could only be got away from the home and the small workshop, where inspection is impracticable, and done in the factory or large workshop, where limitations of hours of labour and sanitary conditions could be enforced, where the force of public opinion could secure the payment of decent wages, and where organization among workers would be possible, the worst phases of the malady would disappear.  The abolition of the small workshop is the great object of a large number of practical reformers who have studied the sweating system.  The following opinion of an expert witness is endorsed by many students of the question—­“If the employers were compelled to obtain workshops, and the goods were made under a factory system, we believe that they could be made quite as cheaply under that system, with greater comfort to the workers, in shorter hours; and that the profits would then be distributed among the workers, so that the public would obtain their goods at the same price."[25] It is maintained that the inferior qualities of shoes are produced and sold more cheaply in the United States by a larger use of machinery under the factory system, than in London under a sweating system, though wages are, of course, much higher in America.  Moreover, many of the products of the London sweating trades are competing on almost equal terms with the products of provincial factories, where machines are used instead of hand-labour.

Sec. 4.  Economic Advantages of “Small Workshops.”—­The question we have to answer is this—­Why has the small workshop survived and grown up in London and other large cities, in direct antagonism to the prevalent industrial movement of the age?  It is evident that the small workshop system must possess some industrial advantages which enable it to hold its own.  The following considerations throw light upon this subject.

1.  A larger proportion of the work in sweating trades is work for which there is a very irregular demand.  Irregularity of employment, or, more accurately speaking, insufficiency of employment—­for the “irregularity” is itself regular—­forms one of the most terrible phases of the sweating system.  The lower you descend in the ranks of labour the worse it is.  A large number of the trades, especially where women are employed, are trades where the elements of “season” and fashion enter in.  But even those which, like tailoring, shirtmaking,