244 
POLITICAL ECONOMY 
To the extremely low-paid occupations 
attention has been frequently and authorita 
tively directed, but it is only of late that an 
experimental handling of the problem of 
“ sweating,” as it is called, has been attempted. 
A brief survey of this abuse will shew, as the 
scientific mind would expect, that its thorough 
cure is bound up with its causes, and that in 
the search for its causes economic analysis is 
an undoubted aid. The theory of wages 
expounded in Chapter VII. of this work 
lays it down that wages tend to equal the 
marginal worth of labour. Then, seemingly, 
a search for the causes of sweating should 
reveal that in certain circumstances labour 
tends for some reason to get substantially less 
than its marginal worth, which may be very 
low in addition, or that it is incapable of 
raising its wage without help, either by im 
proving in efficiency or by moving to trades 
where the recompense for work is on a more 
generous scale. Actually it will be found 
that some or all these disabilities, exist in 
the sweated trades, particularly among out 
workers, and most of the worst paid people 
are out-workers. 
Many out-workers are very inefficient 
because they have never been trained. 
And their work is very unskilled as a rule,