en are generally known to their employers, and their domestic
relations are judged accordingly.

The recent investigations into factory labor in England concern rather
the condition than the wages of women. At flower-making, 11,000 girls
are employed from fourteen to eighteen hours daily. In hardware shops
and factories, they work, from six years of age, fourteen hours daily.
In glass factories, 5,000 women are employed from nine years of age
and upwards, eighteen hours daily. In tobacco factories, 7,000 women
are employed under conditions of great physical suffering. As
knitters, from six years old, they work fourteen hours daily for 1s.
3d. a week! This terrible state of things is partly owing to
competition with the labor of French machinery. A great deal of
ignorant prejudice against machines is one of its results. In
Sheffield files are still made by _hand_, while here in America we
make watches by _machinery_. The disposition of the whole community,
both here and in Great Britain, towards this labor question is kindly.
It has become a momentous social problem. During the fifteen years
that my attention has been riveted to this subject, I have seen a
great change in public feeling.

I have received the Sixth Annual Report of the Society for the
Employment of Women, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury is President,
and Mr. Gladstone a Vice-President. This Society has trained some
hair-dressers, clerks, glass engravers, book-keepers, and telegraph
operators, but its greatest service consists in the constant issue of
tracts, to bias developing public opinion. Such an association should
be started in New York. I should have been glad to inaugurate in
Boston, during the last six years, several important industrial
movements. The war checked the enthusiasm I had succeeded in rousing,
and I have not been able to pause in my special work of collecting and
observing facts, to stimulate it afresh or to solicit personally the
necessary means. How easy it would be for a few wealthy women to test
these experiments. I would first establish a Mending-School, and
having taught women how to darn and patch in a proper manner, I would
scatter them through the country to open shops of their own. As it is,
I do not know a city in which a place exists to which a housekeeper
could send a week's wash, sure that it would be returned with every
button-hole, button, hem, gusset and stay in proper condition. These
mending-shops should take on