quite
possible; but when it becomes a question of children to be fed and
clothed, more than mere existence is impossible, and starvation stands
always in the background. For the younger workers the great
establishments, offer many advantages over the old system, and hours
have been shortened and attempts made in a few cases to improve general
conditions of those employed. But there is always a dull season, in
which wages lessen, or even cease for a time, the actual number of
working days averaging two hundred and eighty. Where work is private and
reputation is established, the year's earnings are a matter of
individual ability, but the mass of workers in these directions drift
naturally toward the great shops which may be found now in every
important street of Paris, and which have altered every feature of the
old system. Whether this alteration is a permanent one, is a question to
which no answer can yet be made. Wages have reached a point barely above
subsistence, and the outlook for the worker is a very shadowy one; but
the question as a whole has as yet small interest for any but the
political economists, while the women themselves have no thought of
organization or of any method of bettering general conditions, beyond
the little societies to which some of the ordinary workers belong, and
which are half religious, half educational, in their character. As a
rule, these are for the lower ranks of needlewomen, but necessity will
compel something more definite in form for the two classes we have been
considering, as well as for those below them, and the time approaches
when this will be plain to the workers themselves, and some positive
action take the place of the present dumb acceptance of whatever comes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS.

"No, madame, there is no more any old Paris. The Paris that I remember
is gone, all gone, save here and there a corner that soon they will pull
down as all the rest. All changes, manners no less than these streets
that I know not in their new dress, and where I go seeking a trace of
what is past. It is only in the churches that one feels that all is the
same, and even with them one wonders why, if it is the same, fewer and
fewer come, and that men smile often at those that enter the doors, and
would close them to us who still must pray in the old places. Is there
that consolation for the worker in America, madame? Can she forget her
sorrow and want at a shrine tha