. Twenty years later the number had doubled, half a million being
found in London alone. This does not include all, since, as Mr. Charles
Booth notes in his recent "Labor and Life of the People," many employed
women do not return their employments.

Mr. Booth's work is a purely private enterprise, assisted by devoted
co-workers, and by trained experts employed at his own expense. For the
final estimate must be added general census returns, and the recent
reports on the sweating-system in London and other English cities.

Beginning with factory operatives and their interests, nothing is easier
than to follow the course of legislation on their behalf. The "Life of
Lord Shaftesbury" is, in itself, the history of the movement for the
protection of women and children,--a movement begun early in the present
century, and made imperative by the hideous disclosures of oppression
and outrage, not only among factory operatives, but the women and
children in mining and other industries. Active as were his efforts and
those of his colleagues, it is only within a generation that the fruit
of their labor is plainly seen. As late as 1844, at the time Engel's
notable book on "The Condition of the Working-Class in England"
appeared, the labor of children of four and five years was still
permitted; and women and children alike worked in mines, in brickyards,
and other exposed and dangerous employments for the merest pittance. The
pages of Engel's book swarm with incidents of individual and class
misery; and while he admits fully, in the appendix prepared in 1886,
that many of the evils enumerated have disappeared, he adds that for the
mass of workers "the state of misery and insecurity in which they live
now is as low as ever, perhaps lower."

Year by year, in spite of constant agitation and the unceasing effort of
Lord Shaftesbury to alter the worst abuses, these evils remained, and
faced the examiner into social problems, slight ameliorations here and
there serving chiefly to throw into darker relief the misery of the
situation. Not only the philanthropist but officials joined hands; and
in the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, each year added to the number and importance of the protests
against an iniquitous system.

Chief among these protests ranked that against the overwork of pregnant
mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing
evils, W. Stanley Jevons, wrote, "infini