But that will not benefit the girls, whose business you have destroyed; they will not be employed in the shops, for they belong to a different grade of labour.

This dilemma meets the social reformer at each step; the complexity of industrial relations appears to turn the chariot of progress into a Juggernaut's car, to crush a number of innocent victims with each advance it makes.

One thing is evident, that if the consuming public were to regulate its acts of purchase with every possible regard to the condition of the workers, they could not ensure that every worker should have good regular work for decent wages.
In arriving at this conclusion, we are far from maintaining that the public even in its private capacity as a body of consumers could do nothing.

A certain portion of responsibility rests on the public, as we saw it rested on employers and on middlemen.

But the malady is rightly traceable in its full force neither to the action of individuals nor of industrial classes, but to the relation which subsists between these individuals and classes; that is, to the nature and character of the industrial system in its present working.