must lead such words as are to be
said on an old yet ever new evil; for it is just forty years ago, since
the winter of 1847-1848 showed among the working men and women of
England conditions analogous to those of the present, though on a far
smaller scale. Acute distress prevailed then as now. Revolution was in
the air, and what it might mean being far less plain to apprehensive
minds than it is to-day, a London newspaper, desirous of knowing just
what dangers were to be faced, sent a commissioner to investigate the
actual conditions of the working classes, and published his reports from
day to day. Then, for the first time, a new word came into circulation,
and "sweating" became the synonym, which it has since remained, for a
system of labor which means the maximum of profit for the employer and
the minimum of wages for the employed. The term is hardly scientific,
yet it is the only one recognized in the most scientific investigation
thus far made. That of 1847-1848 did its work for the time, nor have its
results wholly passed away. Charles Kingsley, young then and ardent, his
soul stirred with longing to lighten all human suffering, took up the
cause of the worker, and in his pamphlet "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," and
later, in the powerful novel "Alton Locke," showed every phase of the
system, then in its infancy, and, practically, entirely unknown on the
other side of the Atlantic.

The results of this agitation became visible at once. Unions and
Associations of various sorts among tailors and the one or two other
trades to which the sweating system had applied, were organized and from
year to year extended and perfected till it had come to be the popular
conviction that, save in isolated cases here and there, the evil was to
be found only among the foreign population, and even there, hedged in
and shorn of its worst possibilities. This conviction remained and made
part of the estimate of any complaints that now and then arose, and
though the work of the organized charities, and of independent
investigations here and there, demonstrated from year to year that it
had increased steadily, its real scope was still unbelieved. Now, after
forty years, the story tells itself again, this time in ways which
cannot be set down as newspaper sensationalism or anybody's desire to
make political capital. It is a Blue Book which holds the latest
researches and conclusions, and Blue Books are not part of the popular
reading, but are u