since the lower class of English women are seldom taught writing or accounts.
Telegraphic Reporters, Phonographers, and Railway-clerks, are on the increase. In reporting the Bright Festival at Manchester last year, the speed and accuracy of the young women were thought very remarkable. Six whole columns were transmitted at the rate of twenty-nine words a minute, almost without mistake, although the subject of the speeches was political, and so supposed to be beyond their comprehension!
Several railways employ women as clerks and ticket-sellers, and the results are more than satisfactory. Thus far the census; which has not been without its interest, since, in English parlance, shoemaker-wife means not merely the wife of a shoemaker, but a wife who shares her husband's labor, or has succeeded to it on his death. Butcher-wife also means a woman who can buy and sell stock, pickle meat, and perhaps drive a cart through the town.
Now for the results of some private letters. When I spoke of forty thousand Metal-workers, your minds did not revert, I trust, to those dens at Wiltenhall, where women have been struck with hammers, files, and even bars of iron glowing at a white heat.
Now, at least, let us visit a pleasanter scene. A man has forged and rolled out the sheet which is soon to pass for a hundred gross of Gillott's pens; but a woman cuts and bends and stamps, grinds, splits, polishes, and packs it, so that her sisters may have pleasure in the using.
It was at Birmingham that your gold chain was made. A man's strength drew out the precious wire; but hundreds of young girls cut it to the required length, shaped it on a metal die to the required pattern, soldered it invisibly over a jet of gas-light, ground the facets till they gleamed and polished the whole length to tempt the gazer's eye. Quiet, diligent, skilful, tidy, they sit; with polished slippers bobbing along the floor; not quite so healthy as those who labor on the pens, for the gas and solder do an unwholesome work. Others burnish the silver plate, sort needles, paint iron and papier-maché trays; and hundreds more are busy cutting and polishing screws,—a work mainly in their hands, because men cannot be trusted with the delicate manipulation.
There is a covered button, my brother, on your coat. Women cut the metal, the cloth cover, the paper stuffing, the silk lining; a child piles these in proper order; and, by one stroke of a magic press, a woman throws them out a finished button.
One young girl in London began life by designing for such buttons, till she found that she had a soul above them, and cheerfully entered an artistic career.