Page:How contagion and infection are spread, through the sweating system in the tailoring trade.djvu/10

4 Seeing that greater profits were made, and with a view to under selling other tradesmen with whom they were in competition, and finding that not only were the rents of workrooms saved, but the expense of fire and light also, these tradesmen became anxious to carry out the system still further. Men were induced to open rooms in their homes as workshops, take in work, and employ those whom they could get within their power through their own debauchery, at a still lower rate than that paid by the master tailors; and by this means enable themselves to live without manual labour on the money thus sweated, or drawn from the wages of the men whom they employed.

It will be easily seen that this system would lead to unhealthy competition: one middleman against another, or one man who took work home for himself and family against the middleman, and vice versa. Hence various practices were adopted by the middlemen to keep those under them in their power, such as the continual supply of drink, and other means which are always at command over the needy, thus still further reducing the wages paid to their dupes. The term "sweating" was used as an expression of contempt for those persons who obtained their income by sweating the wages of those under them in this manner.

The system has made such great strides since first introduced that women and also children of tender years are extensively employed or used to compete, not only against men, but against each other. The utmost degradation has been found to exist amongst those who are victims to this practice; their hours of labour are unlimited and irregular; night-work and Sunday-work are prevalent wherever it is found; therefore, as it has been found necessary to apply legislation to factories and workshops, we claim, in the cause of humanity, that legislation shall also be applied wherever this system is found to exist.

A scene in one of these sweating dens is described by the late Canon Kingsley, in his "Autobiography of Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet," in chapter 21, called "The Sweaters' Den;" but although this took place more than thirty years since, such scenes may not only be witnessed at this day in every district of the metropolis, but also in Manchester, Liverpool, Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Bristol, Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bath, Windsor, Oxford, Cambridge, and in all the large towns of the United Kingdom. To the workpeople themselves it is most degrading, for the whole family of the man engaged in this work is brought in to work for wages that should be earned by the man himself. Little rest is known to them, and youth is turned into premature decay in this competition to live; in numerous cases female virtue is sacrificed in order to induce those giving out the work to favour the particular party whom the female may represent. Advertisements may be seen often in the West End of London for good-looking females with pleasing manners, to take work to and from fashionable tailoring establishments. Cases of this nature have been exposed in the Manchester courts within