is frightful. Young tailors, fresh from the country, are decoyed by the
sweaters' wives into their miserable dens, under extravagant promises of
employment, to find themselves deceived, imprisoned, and starved, often
unable to make their escape for months--perhaps years; and then only
fleeing from one dungeon to another as abominable."

In the meantime, the profits of the beasts of prey who live on these poor
fellows--both masters and sweaters--seem as prodigious as their cruelty.

Hear another working tailor on this point:--"In 1844, I belonged to the
honourable part of the trade. Our house of call supplied the present
show-shop with men to work on the premises. The prices then paid were at
the rate of 6d. per hour. For the same driving capes that they paid 18s.
then, they give only 12s. for now. For the dress and frock coats they gave
15s. then, and now they are 14s. The paletots and shooting coats were 12s.;
there was no coat made on the premises under that sum. At the end of the
season, they wanted to reduce the paletots to 9s. The men refused to make
them at that price, when other houses were paying as much as 15s. for them.
The consequence of this was, the house discharged all the men, and got a
Jew middle-man from the neighbourhood of Petticoat-lane, to agree to do
them all at 7s. 6d. a piece. The Jew employed all the poor people who were
at work for the slop warehouses in Houndsditch and its vicinity. This
Jew makes on an average 500 paletots a week. The Jew gets 2s. 6d. profit
out of each, and having no sewing trimmings allowed to him, he makes the
work-people find them. The saving in trimmings alone to the firm, since
the workmen left the premises, must have realized a small fortune to them.
Calculating men, women, and children, I have heard it said that the cheap
house at the West End employs 1,000 hands. The trimmings for the work done
by these would be about 6d. a week per head, so that the saving to the
house since the men worked on the premises has been no less than L1,300