It sums up the industrial or economic aspects of the problem of city poverty.

Scarcely any trade in its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched "fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed.

This is true not only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his wage of 1s.2d.per diem, and of the lowest class of each manufacturing trade in East and Central London.

It is true of the relatively unskilled labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who on 25s.

a week or less has to support a wife and children and an appearance of respectability; the usher, who grinds out low-class instruction through the whole tedious day for less than the wage of a plain cook; the condition of these and many other kinds of low-class brain-workers is only a shade less pitiable than the "sweating" of manual labourers, and the causes, as we shall see, are much the same.