We suppose then we must have sewing girls—but we see no necessity of forgetting that they are girls—and neither horses nor mules—that they are human beings—noble women, with as warm hearts, and as good blood as ourselves, feeling the same yearnings after sympathy, the same keenness of suffering under insult, neglect or wrong. There is no necessary humiliation in labor. It is in itself of the highest dignity and of the loftiest nobility of extraction. She who, by assiduous industry, makes her little home happy, clothes her infant brothers, and administers to the wants of an aged and decrepit parent, has clothed herself in the holiest of garments, and though their texture may not be of the finest, she may stand up proudly beside the purple of a queen, and if she sees but the trembling of scorn upon the royal lip, may say, “Stand off! I am nobler than thou!” The treatment, however, which some of them receive from very fashionable and very silly young ladies, who have been badly educated by ignorant and vulgar mothers, is humiliating to witness occasionally, and must be very hard to bear continually.
“Hark! that rustle of a dress,
Stiff with lavish costliness;
Here comes one whose cheek would flush
But to have her garment brush
’Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
And in midnight’s still and murk
Stitched her life into the work,
Bending backward from her toil,