by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about "God's heavy judgment
and visitation"--had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the
stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken
slopworker, they would have seen _why_ God had visited them, seen that His
judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system
which "speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth"--a system, to
use the words of the "Morning Chronicle's" correspondent, "unheard of
and unparalleled in the history of any country--a scheme so deeply laid
for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour to the market, that
it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded, by it
into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy--a system which is
steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out
of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artizans, living in
comparative comfort and civilization, into the dishonourable or sweating
trade in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their
incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes."

But to us, almost the worse feature in the whole matter is, that the
government are not merely parties to, but actually the originators of this
system. The contract system, as a working tailor stated, in the name of the
rest, "had been mainly instrumental in destroying the living wages of the
working man. Now, the government were the sole originators of the system
of contracts and of sweating. Forty years ago, there was nothing known of
contracts, except government contracts; and at that period the contractors
were confined to making slops for the navy, the army, and the West India
slaves. It was never dreamt of then that such a system was to come
into operation in the better classes of trade, till ultimately it was
destructive of masters as well as men. The government having been the cause
of the contract system, and consequently of the sweating system, he called
upon them to abandon it. The sweating system had established the show shops