inst each other by the
contractors and sub-contractors, the result upon the workers below
being as disastrous as the general effect of the system as a whole.

As one becomes familiar with the characteristics of the East End,--and
this is only after long and persistent comings and goings in street and
alley,--it is found that there are entire streets in Whitechapel or St.
George's-in-the-East, the points where the tailoring trade seems to
focus, in which almost every house contains one, and sometimes several,
sweating establishments, managed usually by men, but now and then in the
hands of women, though only for the cheapest forms of clothing. Here,
precisely as in our own large cities, a room nine or ten feet square is
heated by a coke fire for the presser's irons, and lighted at night by
flaming gas-jets, six, eight, or even a dozen workers being crowded in
this narrow space. But such crowding is worse here than with us, for
reasons which affect also every form of cheap labor within doors.
London, under its present arrangements, is simply an enormous smoke
factory, and no quarter of its vast expanse is free from the plague of
soot and smoke, forever flying, and leaving a coating of grime on every
article owned or used, no matter how cared for. This is true for
Belgravia as for the East End, and "blacks," as the flakes of soot are
known, are eaten and drunk and breathed by everything that walks in
London streets or breathes London air.

There is, then, not only the foulness engendered by human lungs
breathing in the narrowest and most crowded of quarters, but the added
foulness of dirt of every degree and order, overlaid and penetrated by
this deposit of fine soot; the result a griminess that has no
counterpart on the face of the earth. "Cheap clothes and nasty" did not
end with Kingsley's time, and these garments, well made, and sold at a
rate inconceivably low, are saturated with horrible emanations of every
sort, and to the buyer who stops to think must carry an atmosphere that
ends any satisfaction in the cheapness. Setting aside this phase as an
intangible and, in part, sentimental ground for complaint, the fact that
the cheapness depends also upon the number of hours given by the
worker--whose day is never less than fourteen, and often eighteen,
hours--should be sufficient to ban the whole trade. Even for this
longest day there is no uniformity of price, and with articles
identically the same the rate varies with