For many months of the year just ended (1892) parliamentary investigation has gone on.  Report after report has been made to its committees; and as testimony from accredited sources poured in, incidentally a flood of light has been let in upon many forms of work outside the clothing-manufacturer.  To-day, in four huge volumes of some thousand pages each, one may read the testimony, heart-sickening in every detail,—­a noted French political economist, the Comte d’Haussonville, describing it, in a recent article in “La Revue des deux Mondes” as “The Martyrology of English Industries.”

In such conditions inspection is inoperative.  An army of inspectors would not suffice where every house represents from one to a dozen workshops under its roof, in each of which sanitary conditions are defied, and the working day made more often fourteen and sixteen hours than twelve.  Even for this day a starvation wage is the rule; the sewing-machine operative, for example, while earning a wage of fifteen or eighteen pence, furnishing her own thread and being forced to pay rental on the machine.

A portion of a wage table is given here as illustrative of rates, and used as a reference table before the preparation of Mr. Booth’s book, which gives much the same figures:—­

     Making paper bags, 4-1/2d. to 5-1/2d. per thousand; possible
     earnings, 5s. to 6s. per week.

     Button-holes, 3d. a dozen; possible earnings, 8s. a week.

     Shirts, 2d. each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done
     between 8 A.M. and 11 P.M.

     Sack sewing, 6d. for twenty-five; 8d. to 1s. 6d. per hundred. 
     Possible earnings, 8s. per week.

     Pill-box making, 9s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, 8s.
     per week.

     Shirt button-hole making, 1d. a dozen; can do three or four dozen a
     day.

     Whip-making, 1s. a dozen; can do a dozen a day.

     Trousers finishing, 3d. to 5d. each, finding one’s own cotton; can
     do four a day.

     Shirt-finishing, 3d. to 4d. a dozen; possible earnings, 6s. a week.

Outside of the cities, where the needle is almost the sole refuge of the unskilled worker, every industry is invaded.  A recent report as to English nail and chain workers shows hours and general conditions to be almost intolerable, while the wage averages eightpence a day.  In the mines, despite steady action concerning them, women are working by hundreds for the same rate.  In short, from every quarter comes in repeated testimony that the majority of working Englishwomen are struggling for a livelihood; that a pound a week is a fortune, and that the majority live on a wage below subsistence point.

The enormous influx of foreign population is partly responsible for these conditions, but far less than is popularly supposed; since the Jews, most often accused, are in many cases juster employers than the Christians, and suffer from the same causes.  For all alike, legislation is powerless to reach certain ingrained evils, and the recent sweating-commission ended its report with the words:—­