Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

2Q4- BRITAIN AT WORK. magistrate's clerk (MARYLEBONE POLICE COURT). requisition clerical help in the conduct of their business.. Eliminate clerks, in fact, and, despite railways and telegraphs and ocean greyhounds, British commerce becomes automatically divested of its cosmopolitan character. As more clerks are generally required to cope with the transactions of a. joint stock company than with the business of a private firm, it follows that the. general tendency towards the limited liability system of owner- ship is advantageous to the clerical industry. 1 he railways, the ocean carrying trade, the shipbuilding yards, the coal mines, the cycle factories, the breweries, and engineering works throughout the kingdom, are, as a rule, in the hands of public companies, who employ in all more than half a million clerks. Quite distinct from these great centres of employ- ment is the shopping world—wholesale and i etail. It must not, of course, be supposed that the Whitechapel trader who does business chiefly in halfpence and farthings employs even one bookkeeper permanently. One of his children generally enters roughly the daily transactions. The assistance of a regular clerk is then occasionally requisi- tioned, that he may obtain a clear statement of his financial position. I he clerks who perform these odd jobs are sometimes men who never seem able to retain regular employ- ment. On the other hand, they are often bookkeepers in fairly good situations, who adopt this method of turning their leisure to profit. Certain positions are now reserved for ladies in almost every large mercantile establishment., Shorthand and typewriting- are the lady-clerk s most usual qualifications for employment. Numberless as are the sources of occupation open to clerks, never- theless, very many men are constantly unable to find positions. The reason is twofold. Cheap education has placed within the reach of all the necessary intellectual equipment, and many parents cannot resist the tempta- tion thus thrown in their way to put their children to employment which means an immediate addition to the family exchequer of some trifling weekly sum. , In the second place, there is no such protection against undue clerical competition as is afforded to all classes of skilled mechanics by their trades unions. 1 his is a state of things which cannot very well be remedied, for in ordinary mercantile work there are no long apprenticeships to be passed through, no highly technical knowledge to be acquired. Custom requires that the clerk shall dress