5.  The fact that so large a proportion of master-sweaters are Jews has a special significance.  It seems to imply that the poorer class of immigrant Jews possess a natural aptitude for the position, and that their presence in our large cities furnishes the corner-stone of the vicious system.  Independence and mastery are conditions which have a market value for all men, but especially for the timid and often down-trodden Jew.  Most men will contentedly receive less as master than as servant, but especially the Jew.  We saw that the immigrant Jew, by his capacities and inclinations, was induced to make special efforts to substitute work of management for manual labour, and to become a profit-maker instead of a wage-earner.  The Jew craves the position of a sweating-master, because that is the lowest step in a ladder which may lead to a life of magnificence, supported out of usury.  The Jewish Board of Guardians in London, though its philanthropic action is on the whole more enlightened than that of most wealthy public bodies, has been responsible in no small measure for this artificial multiplication of small masters.  A very large proportion of the funds which they dispensed was given or lent in small sums in order to enable poor Jews “to set up for themselves.”  The effect of this was twofold.  It first assisted to draw to London numbers of continental Jews, who struggled as “greeners” under sweaters for six months, until they were qualified for assistance from the Jewish Board of Guardians.  It then enabled them to set up as small masters, and sweat other “greeners” as they themselves were sweated.  It was quite true that the object of such charity was the most useful which any society could undertake; namely, that of assisting the industrially weak to stand on their own legs.  But it was unfortunately true that this early stage of independence was built upon the miserable dependence of other workers.

6.  But while, as we see, there are many special conditions which, in London especially, favour the small workshop, the most important will be found to consist in the large supply of cheap unskilled labour.  This is the real material out of which the small workshop system is built.  In dealing with the other conditions, we shall find that they all presuppose this abundant supply of labour.  If labour were more scarce, and wages therefore higher, the small workshop would be impossible, for the absolute economy of labour, effected by the factory organization with its larger use of machinery, would far outweigh the number of small economies which, as we have seen, at present in certain trades, favour and make possible the small workshop.  Every limitation in the supply of this low-skilled labour, every expansion of the alternatives offered by emigration, access to free land, &c., will be effectual in crushing a number of the sweating workshops, and favouring the large factory at their expense.