ry day at least as much as her
fortnight's work on the stone-heap would command. And even in Galway, a
concerted and systematic Industrial Education for the Poor would enable
her to earn at some light and suitable employment six times what she now
does.

In every street of the town you constantly meet girls of fourteen to
twenty, as well as old women and children, utterly barefoot and in
ragged clothing. I should judge from the streets that not more than
one-fourth of the females of Galway belong to the shoe-wearing
aristocracy. Now no one acquainted with Human Nature will pretend that
girls of fourteen to twenty will walk the streets barefoot if the means
of buying shoes and stockings by honest labor are fairly within their
reach. But here there are none such for thousands. Born in wretched huts
of rough stone and rotten straw, compared with which the poorest
log-cabin is a palace, with a turf fire, no window, and a mass of filth
heaped up before the door, untaught even to read, and growing up in a
region where no manufactures nor arts are prosecuted, the Irish
peasant-girl arrives at womanhood less qualified by experience,
observation or training for industrial efficiency and usefulness than
the daughter of any Choctaw or Sioux Indian. Of course, not _all_ the
Irish, even of the wretchedly poor, are thus unskilled and helpless, but
a deplorably large class is; and it is this class whose awkwardness and
utter ignorance are too often made the theme of unthinking levity and
ridicule when the poor exile from home and kindled lands in New York and
undertakes housework or anything else for a living. The "awkwardness,"
which means only inability to do what one has never even _seen_ done, is
not confined to any class or nation, and should be regarded with every
allowance.

An Industrial School, especially for girls, in every town, village and
parish of Ireland, is one of the crying needs of the time. I am
confident there are in Galway alone five thousand women and girls who
would hail with gratitude and thoroughly improve an opportunity to earn
six-pence per day. If they could be taught needle-work, plain
dressmaking, straw-braiding, and a few of the simplest branches of
manufactures, such as are carried on in households, they might and would
at once emerge from the destitution and social degradation which now
enshroud them into independence, comfort and consideration. Knowing how
to work and to earn a decent subsistence, t