There are many English women engaged in the occupation of nail-making.
They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary
farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks,
drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across
their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and dirtiest drudgery is
to be done, there they are almost invariably to be found. For wages,
they sometimes get tenpence a day, sometimes only sixpence. If they
perform overwork, they get a penny an hour,--a penny for the hauling of
a canal-boat for an hour! Here is poverty in its most abject condition,
and hard work in its most killing form. Their victims are necessarily
toilworn, degraded, and hopelessly immoral.

It is such extreme destitution that drives women to crime. In an English
paper-mill, where the girls worked at counting the sheets in a room by
themselves, and made good wages, they were all well-behaved and
respectable. In another department of the same mill, where the work was
dirty and the wages only a shilling a day, they were almost uniformly of
bad character. The base employment degraded them,--the starvation wages
demoralized them. Philanthropy has not been deaf to the cries of these
unhappy classes, and has made repeated and herculean efforts to improve
their condition and reform their morals. But the stumbling-block of
excessively low wages was always in the way. It was found, that, until
the physical condition was improved, the ordinary wants of life
supplied, the moral status was incapable of elevation.

I grant that no one item of this long catalogue of calamities has yet
overtaken the women of our own country. It would seem that the fact must
be, that in other lands the sex is not more degraded than it was
centuries ago, but that it has never been permitted to rise to its true
level. Once put down, it has always been kept down.

The contrast between the condition of women in foreign countries and
their condition here is too striking to be overlooked. We have our
hardships, our trials, our privations; but what are they to those of our
European sisters? If we get low wages, they are in most cases sufficient
to enable us to maintain a respectable position and a decent appearance.
If the influence of caste is felt among us, if by some it is considered
ungenteel to work, this prejudice is not of American growth, but was
transferred to our shores from the very people with