have their character formed in great measure by the young girls now at work in our factories, can we take too much interest in their welfare, can we do too much in the way of careful training to fit them for the responsible positions they will sooner or later occupy? What is their condition at present? What are their credentials ? The majority of them are daughters of women who have gone through all the drudgery of factory life before them. They have been taken from a school as speedily as the schoolinspector consented to relax his hold upon them, for families are large, and wages do not increase as children increase, and the sooner both girls and boys can help to keep the wolf from the door the better. This is the stern logic of parents who have gone through the same mill themselves, and who think such a course is perfectly right and proper, and, moreover, unavoidable. It is true that in some cases it is unavoidable, but it is not unavoidable in all, and in no case is it right and proper.

Up to the time of leaving school the life of the average city girl, in spite of many drawbacks, may be looked upon as fairly hopeful. Possibly she does not know half so much as the school-inspector gives her credit for. Still, she has had an elementary education that under favourable circumstances would bring about good results. She has had perhaps too much "minding baby," and certainly not enough play and wholesome exercise in fresh air; but she has been under her mother's eye; all her affections have been centred in home, however uncomfortable that home may have been. She is handy with her needle, she can help in cooking the Sunday dinner, and perform various household duties in a creditable manner. She is in a fair way to become a thoroughly domesticated young person, and she possesses the germs of the finest womanly qualities, affection and devotion, although up to the present "baby" has perhaps been their principal object. The time comes, however, only too soon, when the little scholar, nurse, and mother's help is changed into a very different character indeed. She must be withdrawn from school and help to produce money to support the family; and here two courses are open to her. She may leave home entirely, and become a domestic servant, or she may obtain daily employment in a factory or other place of business where female labour is utilised. Unfortunately, in the huge majority of cases the liberty and license of factory life possesses far greater attractions than the more restricted but certainly more wholesome, fruitful, and womanly life of domestic service. The young girl has perhaps heard vague stories of mistresses treating their servants in a haughty, arrogant, and uncharitable spirit, forcing them to church, tyrannising over their bonnet-strings, and otherwise making themselves unpleasant. On the other hand, she sees every day girls who are not domestic servants rejoicing in feathers and ribbons as gorgeous as

they please, with the full liberty of spending a few hours every evening in whatever manner they may think proper. Such a career appears to her far more pleasant, and into the vortex of factory life she goes. She finds herself placed among a number of other girls whose sole idea of relief from the monotony of their daily task appears to be empty frivolous gossip, even if it is nothing worse. The everyday routine, in a bad atmosphere, soon produces a not unnatural longing for the freedom of the evening. No good angel stands by to administer a soothing word, to speak encouragingly of duty and of hope; work becomes an irritating task, and the home-the discomforts of which were once invisible to her young eyes-becomes full of faults, and loses its old charm. The other girls, too, soon take pains to give her lessons in liberty. They point out to her that it is not right that she should be expected, after a hard day's work, to assist her mother in the evening; they are careful to inform her just the proportion of her wages she should be allowed to keep for herself, and how much she should contribute to the family purse. This leads to many angry words at home. How can it be otherwise when a mercenary, selfish fiend stands between a mother and her child?

The girl soon commences to seek pleasure elsewhere, and she is fortunate indeed if she resists the temptation of the sixpenny dancingsaloon and the public-house. She vies with her fellows in feathers. and frills, and, like them, the sole ambition of her life becomes centred in one idea-marriage. Home is uncomfortable, and she not unnaturally views with repugnance a life of factory labour, and the only chance of escape appears to her to be marriage. She has perhaps become imbued with some wild, distorted views of love-the sort of shoddy article that is held up for admiration in the penny novels she devours daily-but the feeling uppermost in her heart is decidedly mercenary. She has felt the pinch of poverty, and she has a strong desire to marry a man in a better position than her father; at the same time she would prefer marrying a poor man to not marrying at all. The true and holy spirit of love, self-sacrificing, tender, and worshipful, finds no place in the heart of this shrewd, worldly-minded, uncultivated girl. It would be surprising if it did. All these details appear uninteresting, trifling, commonplace. Would that they were not so; would that in looking into such lives we could find in them some pure ambition, some high-souled purpose that would redeem them from the commonplace; some touch of nature that would make them full of interest and worthy of emulation.

Remember, the education of these young girls ceases entirely the moment they leave school. The dull, weary hours in the workshop are succeeded by hours of leisure frittered away in an aimless fashion; the intellect is left to become debased or to perish; it receives no culture whatever. Reading is, as a rule, confined to trashy novelettes and the police intelligence of the Sunday newspapers. Cross

examine these young women on the subject of the latest murdertrial, and you will find they have all the details at their finger-ends. Test them on social matters concerning their own well-being and the happiness of millions of their fellow-creatures, and you will find them dumb. The great world of life, thought, and action, outside the sphere of the workshop, the gossip of the neighbours, and the flirtation and levity of the dancing saloon and the streets, is to them a blank. These are the young women, let it not be forgotten, who are to be the life-companions and helpmates of men who have a thorny path to travel, full of trials and temptations; it will be their task to make a humble, scantily-furnished home so attractive that a husband shall find within its four walls more real happiness and joy than he can obtain elsewhere; it will be their mission to help him fight against those who will be ever at his elbow, urging him to drown the cares of life in the excitement that cities great and small offer at It will be for them to inspire men with hope and energy every turn. in the hour of disappointment; and, above all, it will be their task to train up and keep in health the children who are to make the future. Lives will be placed in their hands for them to mould into instruments of good or evil. In the same ratio as they fail to fulfil their duties will the miseries of the world be increased; and how little are they qualified by culture and practical training to successfully grapple with the great responsibilities they are so willing to accept because they do not realise their gravity? Many of them will turn out good housekeepers, capital scrubbers of floors and cleaners of windows; but there is something more than these qualities required in one who is to be a wife and mother. These qualities are in the labour market, they may be purchased at the price of a small daily wage. To redeem the men of the proletariat something more is required of woman; those gifts that cannot be purchased with money, that are priceless. Spiritual sympathy, union of hearts and intellects, the graceful flow of ideas in common, and the aspirations after a higher life-without these influences at work in the homes of the humblest artisan your attempts to make the people sober and moral by Act of Parliament will fail. The morality and happiness of the people must ever be governed by the conditions of family life. The good folks who marvel and complain loudly at the total absence of religious feeling among what they call the lower classes should try their hands at putting into practice the sublime tenets of the Sermon on the Mount or the golden rules of Buddha in one or two uncomfortable rooms, with all the difficulties of cramped-up city life, and with a family governed, or rather ungoverned, by a wife and mother incapable of fulfilling the higher functions of her office. If priests and philanthropists would only indulge themselves with a little hard prosaic experience they would soon cease to wonder why gin-shops flourish and churches are empty.

It is easy to point out the evils that exist; it is not so easy to supply practical means for eradicating them. The fiend of misery and pain that haunts the narrow streets of our great cities is not to be banished by a few printed sentences; the most gifted among us can but hope, with the humblest, that by all classes exchanging ideas in thoughtful earnest the sufferings of our fellows may in some measure be alleviated. Those who would grapple with the difficulties concerning the wives and mothers of the working class have much to encourage them in their task. It is an inspiriting fact that, notwithstanding all the disadvantages arising from lack of proper education and training, there are thousands of instances of the wives of working men rising superior to their surroundings, and thoroughly fulfilling their duties of life-and-soul companion to man and guardian angel to children. We must not allow these exceptional cases to lead us into any false optimism concerning the efficiency of the present system of educating the women of the working classes. It is a trite saying that one swallow does not make a summer, and none the less is it true that one competent wife cannot remedy the evil that is caused by a thousand incompetent ones. Fault-finding is an unpleasant although a necessary task, and it would be a far happier one to point out the good qualities the young girls working in our factories to-day really do possess gifts and graces under the roughest exteriors, that only require to be trained and cultivated to bring about blessings inestimable. The foremen in our factories are ready witnesses to the wit and intelligence possessed by these girls when they first go to them; but these qualities are allowed to remain, to a great extent, dormant, or to run wild, and they are, before long, more or less centred on the not very edifying task of husbandhunting. Culture and education, leading up, as they do, to true religious feeling and due appreciation of responsibilities, form one of the means of redeeming these wives and mothers of the future from purposeless lives of wretchedness and disappointment.

The mischief is that the moment a girl leaves school her education ceases, and this at the very age when she is most capable of being led into higher grades of thought and feeling. It is futile to close our eyes to facts, however painful they may be; and it is best at once to recognise that the present day necessities of a workman's life make it imperative that his daughters in part leave the home-life and go out to work. But this fact, unfortunate as it is, does not present insuperable obstacles to a young girl's proper training. Her education can still be carried on in some of her leisure hours, and let employers, for their own sakes, make these as many as possible. It should be conducted in the home by the joint efforts of the parents, but at present the majority of them are incapable of taking up such a task. As a substitute, until a generation of competent mothers and fathers shall arise, a plentiful supply of public evening

classes might do the work which would lead to such happy results if it could but be conducted in the home. No girl should be allowed to reach a marriageable age without having learned something besides the three R's. She should at least be well acquainted with the structure of her own body, and thus be more competent to keep it free from disease. She should be taught the real value of the various kinds of food, and not be left to flounder on in the slough of ignorant superstition concerning articles of diet that hitherto has been a curse to the working classes. She should be sufficiently acquainted with the social and political history of her own country and other countries to be able to discuss intelligently with her future husband the questions of national and international importance that he may take an interest in, so that he need not be compelled to go to the public-house in search of some one who takes an interest in public affairs and whose opinion is worth listening to. Of music she should certainly know sufficient to be able to teach her children in the future simple part-songs, so that their young voices may ever make the home bright and cheerful, however humble it may be. With gentle persuasion, her reading should be restricted to literature that is likely to be of real service in helping her to realise the influential and responsible position she holds in relation to the human race. Such a course will certainly deprive her of the frivolous and unprofitable fiction that women now take so much delight in ; but it will open up to her a field of romance and poetry that will bring to her otherwise prosaic life beauty and inspiration, hope and faith in herself and her fellows. When every workman's daughter is cained up to be an intelligent being, worthy of her sex, then the women of the working classes will feel that their whole duty does not consist in scrubbing and mending, that they have other work to do, no less useful, no less womanly.

The old-fashioned ghosts that are raised up even to-day to frighten those who have faith in the higher education of the people are unworthy of notice. It is said that an educated people will feel themselves above manual labour, and that they will be hopelessly deteriorated by an unwholesome craving to be "genteel." Such prophecies are only made by the prejudiced, the jealous, and those who have selfish reasons for fearing the growth of a well-educated people. Depend upon it, no cobbler enjoys making a good shoe so much as the cobbler whose friends in his leisure hours are Shakspeare and Milton, and no woman is likely to scrub a floor the worse or darn a stocking less neatly for having learned to love George Eliot and Longfellow. It is only by culture that men and women can be brought to realise the full glory and honour of manual labourculture, that is, which embraces not merely the knowledge of facts, but an appreciation of duties-the cultivation of the heart as well as the intellect. A LONDON ARTISAN.