class of workers who suffer.  More and more they need the humanity of the responsible employer to protect them against the rigours of the labour-market.  The worst miseries of the early factory times were due directly to the break-up of the responsibility of employers.  This was slowly recognized by the people of England, and the series of Factory Acts, Employers’ Liability Acts, and other measures for the protection of labour, must be regarded as a national attempt to build up a compulsory legal responsibility to be imposed upon employers in place of a natural responsibility based on moral feeling.  We draft legislation and appoint inspectors to teach employers their duty towards employes, and to ensure that they do it.  Thus in certain industries we have patched up an artificial mechanism of responsibility.

Wherever this legal responsibility is not enforced in the case of low-skilled workers, we have, or are liable to have, “sweating.”  Glancing superficially at the small workshop or sweating-den, it might seem that this being a mere survival of the old system, the legal enforcement of responsibility would be unnecessary.  But it is not a mere survival.  In the small workshop of the old system the master was the real employer.  In the modern “sweating” den he is not the real employer, but a mere link between the employing firm and the worker.  From this point of view we must assign as the true cause of sweating, the evasion of the legal responsibility of the Factory Act rendered possible to firms which employ outside workers either directly or indirectly through the agency of “sweaters.”  Although it might be prudent as a means of breaking up the small workshop to attempt to impose upon the “middleman” the legal responsibility, genuine reform directed to this aspect of “sweating,” can only operate by making the real employing firm directly responsible for the industrial condition of its outdoor direct or indirect employes.

This responsibility imposed by law has been strengthened as an effective safeguard of the interests of the workers by combination among the latter.  In skilled industries where strong trade organization exists, the practical value of such combination exceeds the value of restrictive legislation.

“In their essence Trade Unions are voluntary associations of workmen, for mutual protection and assistance in securing the most favourable conditions of labour.”  “This is their primary and fundamental object, and includes all efforts to raise wages or prevent a reduction of wages; to diminish the hours of labour or resist attempts to increase the working hours; and to regulate all matters pertaining to methods of employment or discharge, and modes of working."[27] Engineers, boiler-makers, cotton-spinners, printers, would more readily give up the assistance given them by legislative restriction than the power which they have secured for themselves by combination.  It is in proportion as trade combination is weak that