The strike of the match girls at MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY'S factory is still going on, and there are no signs as yet that an arrangement is likely to be arrived at. Something has been done in the course of the past week. Many of the girls engaged in the wax match business have been taken back by the firm and are now at full work, but the great majority of the strikers, whose business lay with the manufacture of wooden matches, are still holding out. It does not seem that the time has come at which a near settlement of the dispute can be looked for with much hope. Money has been collected for the girls by their outside champions and advisers, and while this fund lasts the strike may be expected to last. Nor are MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY in any mind to take back the whole body of the strikers. They make a distinction between those whom they know to have been the prime movers in the affair and those who have been led on by the others. With the ringleaders they will have nothing to do. The followers they will take on again as soon as it pleases them to comeback, provided, that is, that there is still room for them and that their vacated places have not in the meanwhile been filled up. It is now more than a week since the strike began. On Thursday morning, July 5, the bulk of the girls came out, and from that time to this they have been living on their last week's wages, helped out by a portion of the sums subscribed for them, the balance of which is to be paid over to them today. It is not possible that this state of things can go on indefinitely. Their most ardent sympathizers will not be willing to continue to support them in voluntary or enforced idleness. They must either return to their old work or most find new work of another kind, thereby reducing by their competition the miserably poor wages of unskilled female labour in the East-end of London. It is a dismal prospect, but such as this is almost certainly the end of a strike entered upon with inadequate resources and at the instigation of agitators who make it the business of their lives to sow discord between employers and employed.

That the strike at MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY'S factory has been of this nature is clear. Whatever may be the truth as to the wages which the girls have been receiving and as to the unjust treatment of which they now complain, it can be shown on conclusive evidence that the course which they have followed has not been of their own choice, but has been suggested to them and pressed upon them, and we might almost say forced upon them, by interference from the outside. The strike was carefully prepared for by inflammatory articles and addresses and by promises of effective help which have not been very well kept. The lowest rate of wages paid to unskilled apprentices who were learning the business has been put forward as the average for all workers. Every asserted grievance has been listened to and accepted as truth, and has been restated in print in a grossly exaggerated form. Contrasts have been drawn between the well-to-do proprietors and shareholders in the business and the poorly paid working hands by whose labour the wealth of the others has been created - as if capital and directing skill counted for nothing, and as if wages were not largely determined by that general state of the labour market which employers find in existence, and which neither they nor their hands have any choice but to accept. It would seem, indeed, that the present strike has been singularly ill-timed. It is not denied that the average amount of each girl's weekly earnings has been lower than usual during the few past weeks, the reason being that owing to the lateness of the season the girls have not been drawn off, as they generally are, for work in the vegetable and fruit gardens. Peas and strawberries are a late crop this year, so that MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY'S factory has given employment to so many the more hands, while there has been no corresponding increase in the amount of work to be done. It thus follows that, although the wages sheet may be as large as ever, the payment to each girl on a system of piece work will be less. But this, as LORD BRASSEY has pointed out in his book on Work and Wages, is the common rule with a strike. Grievances so-called naturally occur at a time when work is slack, or when pay for any reason is low. If a strike follows, it is predestined to almost certain failure, for it is entered upon under just the conditions least favourable to success.

The pity is that the match girls have not been suffered to take their own course, but have been egged on to strike by irresponsible advisers. No effort has been spared by those posts of the modern industrial world, the Social Democrats, to bring the quarrel to a head. MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY have been picked out by the agitators for special obloquy and attack. Attempts have been made to bring abut a wholesale boycotting of the firm, and, although these are not likely to be as successful as their contrivers wish, they will do and have done some mischief, the effect of which will be as injurious to the employed as to the employers, and will be felt most severely by those whose ordinary scale of living gives the least margin for reduction. Beyond this, we do not intend to go into the merits of the case. There is the usual conflict of testimony about facts and figures. The extreme statements which have been made by some of the girls, or are said to have been made by them, and which are repeated in an exaggerated form in the low-class journals which affect to have espoused their cause, may be passed without notice. The letter which we published on Thursday with four signatures appended to it, two of them from Toynbee-hall, is of a different type. It professes to be the result of a series of careful inquiries, and the authors of it claim to be in a position to give an accurate account of the conditions of work and of the rate of wages paid in MESSRS. BRYANT and MAY'S factory. It appears, however, from the further letter which we publish this morning from the same four persons that their earlier investigations, careful as they may have been were less complete than they ought to have been. The letter of Thursday gave one version of the story. To-day's letter gives another and a different version, contradicting the former in almost every single point. We were first fold that the wages of the "fillers" had been reduced. We learn now that they have been raised. The point at issue is on a direct question of fact. The girls say that they are paid 10d. for filling a hundred coils. MESSRS BRYANT and MAY say that they are paid a shilling. So, too, with the cutters down, who complained of receiving a farthing less than formerly for every three gross of boxes, and who are now said to receive in effect a halfpenny more. The deductions of which the packers complained are now said to have been either discontinued long ago or not to have been by order of the firm, but by the girls' own choice as payment for help received. The grievance of excessive and arbitrary fines is now so minimized as to come practically to nothing. We are not to regard this second letter as a recantation of the first. It is a statement of the case from the employers' point of view, as the first was a statement on the evidence taken from the girls. We will make no attempt to decide between the two, nor do our correspondents give us any help. They tell us only that the conclusion will be drawn by our readers, but they omit to tell us what the proper conclusion is.