who suffer most from ill-health.

One typing office and school, of high repute for excellence of work,
had rooms so dark that electric light was always used in one or other
of them during part of the day. No sun ever entered the work-rooms.
The salaries were good, but overtime was paid at only 6d. an hour.
There was a sort of compulsion, too, to work overtime; some of the
best typists, occasionally even stayed all night during excessive
rushes of work. No holidays were paid for, and it was regarded as
disloyalty on the part of a clerk to stay away for sickness. There
was an instance of a girl being dismissed because she stayed away a
fortnight owing to influenza. This particular firm recently moved into
bigger, brighter rooms, not out of humanity to its staff, but because
the lease had run out.

Where competition is as keen as in the typing business, it is often
the case that the comfort of employees is considered as little as is
compatible with running the place at a profit. There seems to be no
inspection, and there is no law to say how many typists may be worked
together, or what limit of noise shall be endured by them. Everything
is ruled by the individual standard of decency of the employer. Many
well-educated girls enter typing offices for the excellent practical
training to be had, and for the short time they remain they are
willing to put up with severe discipline and some personal discomfort.
There are, of course, typing offices with as high a level of comfort
and decency as the most exacting law would prescribe. Many of the
big engineering firms and City houses have most comfortable and even
luxurious quarters for their women clerks.

In old days in the above-mentioned northern school, it was possible
to get complete teaching as a clerk--excellent teaching, too--for a
guinea a term. There were some shorthand typists whose training cost
them only that initial guinea and the fees of the supplementary course
of evening classes, 5s. and 10s. according to the number of subjects.
In London at that time a year's course in the same subjects cost
as much as 60 guineas at some of the chief typing schools. The fee
nowadays, at one of the foremost London schools for a secretarial
course for six months only, is 60 guineas; a year's course is L100.[2]
This includes book-keeping and shorthand correspondence in one foreign
language, besides shorthand and typing, etc.

The best testimony shows that a year is altogether too