have hit them with; but who now
are made humble by the sight of wife and children almost starving,
and who go before 'relief committees,' and submit to be questioned
about their wants with a patience and humility which it is painful,
almost schocking, to witness, And some others of these fathers turn
out in the morning with long besoms as street-sweepers, while others
again go to breaking stones in the town's yard or open road-side,
where they are unprotected from the keen east winds, which add a
little more to the burden of misery which they have to bear just
now. But, harder even than this, our factory-women and girls have
had to turn out; and, plodding a weary way from door to door, beg a
bit of bread or a stray copper, that they may eke out the scanty
supply at home. Only the other day, while taking a long stroll in
the country lying about the town in which I live, I met a few of
these factory-girls, and was stopped by their not very beggar-like
question of 'Con yo help us a bit?' They were just such as my own
sisters; and as I saw and heard them, I was almost choked as I
fancied my sisters come to such a pass as that. 'Con yo help us a
bit?' asked these factory girls.

. . . I have heard of ladies whose whole lives seem to be but a
changing from one kind of pleasure to another; who suffer chiefly
from what they call ennui, (a kind of disease from which my sisters
are not likely to suffer at all,) and to whom a new pleasure to
enjoy would be something like what a new world to conquer would be
to Alexander. Why should they not hear our Lancashire girls' cry of
'Con yo help us a bit?' Why should not they be reminded that these
girls in cotton gowns and wooden clogs are wending their way towards
the same heaven--or, alas, towards the same hell--whither wend all
the daughters of Eve, no matter what their outer condition and
dress? Why should not they be asked to think how these striving
girls have to pray daily, 'Lead us not into temptation,' while
temptations innumerable stand everywhere about them?

Those of us who are men would rather do much than let our sisters go
begging. May not some of us take to doing more to prevent it? I
remember some poetry about the

'Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin,'

and know that they hunt oftener together than singly. We have felt
the fangs of the first: upon how many of us will the second
pounce?"

In a second letter, inserted in The Times of April 22, 1862, the
same writer