" The
competition described in this picture only differs from other
competitions for low-skilled town labour in as much as the conditions of
tender gave a tragical concentration to the display of industrial
forces. This picture, exaggerated as it will appear to those who have
not seen it, brings home to us the essential character of free
competition for low-skilled labour where the normal supply is in excess
of the demand. If other forms of low-skilled labour were put up to be
scrambled for in the same public manner, the scene would be repeated _ad
nauseam_. But because the competition of seamstresses, tailors, shirt-
finishers, fur-sewers, &c., is conducted more quietly and privately, it
is not less intense, not less miserable, and not less degrading. This
struggle for life in the shape of work for bare subsistence wages, is
the true logical and necessary outcome of free competition among an over
supply of low-skilled labourers.
Sec. 3. The Multiplication of "Small Masters."--Having made so much
progress in our analysis, we shall approach more intelligently another
important aspect of the "sweating system." Mr. Booth and other
investigators find the tap-root of the disease to consist in the
multiplication of small masters. The leading industrial forces of the
age, as we have seen, make for the concentration of labour in larger and
larger masses, and its employment in larger and larger factories. Yet in
London and in certain other large centres of population, we find certain
trades which are still conducted on a small scale in little workshops or
private houses, and those trades furnish a very large proportion of the
worst examples of "sweating.
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