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at the West End 676 men, women, and children working under sweaters, and
occupying 92 small rooms, the majority of which measured eight feet by
ten. The sweater, it may be as well to state, is the man who contracts
with the large houses to supply them with shirts, or clothes, or any
other kind of slop work; the more his victims sweat, the more are his
gains. The sweater is often a Jew, never a Christian.

Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment--a
mart, we believe, as it is called. The building, as you approach it,
seems a palace. It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass
and gilt. You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the
Arabian Nights. It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed,
or some great national desire had been realised. You enter with cash,
and all is fair and smooth within. Whatever you want in the way of
apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford
to sell it. Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest? Does he
steal the cloth? Certainly not. Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and
wages? Most certainly he does. Do not his creditors all get twenty
shillings in the pound? Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them,
and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right. So far
as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy. How, then, does he
make his profit? How is this monster establishment maintained? Out of
what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for? We shall now
see. Come down this stinking court. Go up those creaking stairs. Enter
that miserable garret. Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but
its curse, and of life but its misery. Mark the haggard faces already
stamped with the impress of death. If you can bear the polluted
atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning
far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and
the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by
them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made. And
now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a
Golgotha--a place of skulls. Is another illustration needed? Up in yon
miserable chamber, without fire--without food--without furniture--almost
without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which
she prolongs life, and its misery. Once, youth w