ferent from the facts
of a generation ago. Then, with wages hardly above "subsistence point,"
the thrifty Frenchwoman not only lived, but managed to put by a trifle
each month. Wages have risen, but prices have at the same time advanced.
Every article of daily need is at the highest point,--sugar, which the
London workwoman buys at a penny a pound, being twelve cents a pound in
Paris; and flour, milk, eggs, equally high. Fuel is so dear that
shivering is the law for all save the wealthy; and rents are no less
dear, with no "improved dwellings" system to give the most for the scant
sum at disposal. Bread and coffee, chiefly chiccory, make one meal;
bread alone is the staple of the others, with a bit of meat for Sunday.
Hours are frightfully long, the disabilities of the French needleworker
being in many points the same as those of her English sister. In short,
even skilled labor has many disabilities, the saving fact being that
unskilled is in far less proportion than across the Channel, the present
system of education including many forms of industrial training.

Generations of freer life than that of England, and many traditions in
her favor give certain advantages to the woman born on French soil. It
is taken for granted that she will after marriage share her husband's
work or continue her own, and her keen intelligence is relied upon to a
degree unknown to other nations. Repeated wars, and the enrolment of all
her men for fixed periods of service, have developed the capacity of
women in business directions, and they fill every known occupation. The
light-heartedness of her nation is in her favor, and she has learned
thoroughly how to extract the most from every centime. There is none of
the hopeless dowdiness and dejection that characterize the lower order
of Englishwoman. Trim, tidy, and thrifty, the Frenchwoman faces poverty
with a smiling courage that is part of her strength, this look changing
often for the older ones into a patience which still holds courage.

Thus far there is no official report of the industries in which they are
engaged, and figures must be drawn from unofficial sources. M. Paul
Leroy-Beaulieu, the noted political economist, in his history of "The
Labor of Women in the Nineteenth Century," computes the number of women
at work in the manufactories of textile fabrics, cotton, woollen, linen,
and silk, as nearly one million; and outside of this is the enormous
number of lace-makers and general w