is very low indeed in really overcrowded slums, but it also is true
that the section of the population among which real purity is most
common is the artisan section, and many of them have to contend with
very poor housing conditions. The Royal Commission on Venereal Disease
reported that while the class of casual laborers is the worst in the
country, the next in the scale is the one described as "middle and
upper classes". Traveling west in our cities does not mean traveling
towards morality.


_Sweating_


There are three main directions in which sweating tends to increase
immorality. In the first place low wages paid to men make marriage very
difficult, and sometimes impossible. And nothing could be worse for any
community than that healthy and robust men should be debarred from
marriage after twenty-one by purely material considerations. It is not
impossible for a man to remain chaste through a lifetime of celibacy,
but for all that a society that enforces celibacy on men against their
will is making immorality a practical certainty.

A particularly mean form of this evil occurs in connection with the
living-in system which is imposed by a good many big shops on their
employees. I used to know a number of young men of marriageable age who
were housed in a great and bare sort of barracks and given in addition
a wage that was only enough to provide dress and necessary etceteras.
If, desiring to marry, they said that they wished to live out and to
receive the equivalent of their board and lodging in money, they got in
those pre-war days £18 a year extra. Is it to be wondered at that in