e ceased to own sight or smell of any growing
thing.

But, in a gray and forlorn old group of houses known as Clark's
Buildings, will be found, on certain evenings in the month, a little
knot of women, each with open account-book, studying over small piles of
pence and silver, and if their looks are any indication, drawing very
little satisfaction from the operation. They are the secretaries of the
little societies organized by the late Mrs. Patterson, who, like many
other philanthropists, came to see that till the workers themselves were
roused to the consciousness of necessity for union, but little could be
accomplished for them. A few of the more intelligent, stirred by her
deep earnestness, banded together twelve years ago, and organized a
society known as "The Society of Women Employed in Shirt, Collar, and
Under-linen Making;" and here may be found the few who have, from long
and sharp experience, discovered the chief needs of workers in these
trades. When outward conditions as they show themselves at present have
been studied, when homes and hours and wages and all the details of the
various branches have become familiar, it is to this dim little hall
that one comes for a final puzzle over all that is wrong.

For it is all wrong; nor in any corner of working London, can any fact
or figures make a right of the toil that is an old, old story; so old
that there is even impatience if one tells it again. Numbers are
unknown, each one who investigates giving a different result; but it is
quite safe to say that five hundred thousand women live by the
industries named in the society's title, not one of whom has ever
received, or ever will receive, under the present system, a wage which
goes beyond bare subsistence. Here, as in New York, or any other large
city of the United States, the conditions governing the trade are much
the same. The women, untrained and unskilled in every other direction,
turn to these branches of sewing as the possibility for all, and scores
wait for any and every chance of work from manufactory or small house.
As with us, the work is chiefly put out, and necessarily at once arises
the middle-man, or a gradation of middle-men, each of whom must have his
profit, taken in every case--not from employer, but worker. The employer
fixes his rates without reference to these. He is fighting, also, for
subsistence, plus as many luxuries as can be added from the profits of
his superior power over condition