the hearts of the women themselves, and I wish them to have some significance for men, for if these women had the pocket-money which their taste and position require, they would never dream of such competition. One thing these men should know, that such women are generally known to their employers, and their domestic relations are judged accordingly.
The recent investigations into factory labor in England concern rather the condition than the wages of women. At flower-making, 11,000 girls are employed from fourteen to eighteen hours daily. In hardware shops and factories, they work, from six years of age, fourteen hours daily. In glass factories, 5,000 women are employed from nine years of age and upwards, eighteen hours daily. In tobacco factories, 7,000 women are employed under conditions of great physical suffering. As knitters, from six years old, they work fourteen hours daily for ls. 3d. a week! This terrible state of things is partly owing to competition with the labor of French machinery. A great deal of ignorant prejudice against machines is one of its results. In Sheffield files are still made by hand, while here in America we make watches by machinery. The disposition of the whole community, both here and in Great Britain, towards this labor question is kindly. It has become a momentous social problem. During the fifteen years that my attention has been riveted to this subject, I have seen a great change in public feeling.
I have received the Sixth Annual Report of the Society for the Employment of Women, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury is President, and Mr. Gladstone a Vice-President. Chis Society has trained some hair-dressers, clerks, glass engravers, book-keepers, and telegraph operators, but its greatest service consists in the constant issue of tracts, to bias developing public opinion. Such an association should be started in New York. I should have been glad to inaugurate in Boston, during the last six years, several important industrial movements. The war checked the enthusiasm I had succeeded in rousing, and I have not been able to pause in my special work of collecting and observing facts, to stimulate it afresh or to solicit personally the necessary means. How easy it would be for a few wealthy women to test these experiments. I would first establish a Mending-School, and having taught women how to darn and patch in a proper manner, I would scatter them through the country to open shops of their own. As it is, I do not know a city in which a place exists to which a housekeeper could send a week's wash, sure that it would be returned with every button-hole, button, hem, gusset and stay in proper condition. These mending-shops should take on apprentices, who should be sent to the house to do every sort of repairing with a needle. I would open another school to train women to every kind of trivial service, now clumsily or inadequately performed by men. If, for instance, yon now send to au upholsterer to have an old window-blind or blind fixture repaired, his apprentice will replace the entire thing, at a proportionate cost, leaving the old screw-holes to gape at the gazer. I would train women to wash, repair, and replace in part, and to carry in their pockets little vials of white or red lead to fill the gaping holes. Full employment could be found for such apprentices.:
LAW.
The number of laws passed the last six years affecting the condition cf women has been very small. The New York Assembly in February, 1865, passed a law putting the legal evidence of a married woman on the sanie basis us if she were a "femme sole." The Massachusetts Legislature have legalized marriage ceremonies performed by an ordained woman, and in January, 1866, Mr. Peckham, of Worcester, moved for a joint Special Committee "to consider in what way a more just and equal compensation shall be awarded to female labor." On the 4th of April just passed Samuel E. Sewall and others petitioned for leave to appoint women on School Committees. It is difficult to conceive on what ground such petitioners had leave to withdraw. These things are only valuable as indicating that public attention is still alive. Some remarkable illustrations of the absurdity of old lays might be recorded. One of these is to be found in the family history of Mad. de Bedout, recently dead at Paris.
A very important convention came together at Leipsic, in September, 1865. One hundred and fifty women assembled, pledged to assert the right to labor, and to bridge the gulf between the compensations of the two sexes. Madame Louise Otto Peters opened