The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of reading or writing, but of ignorance in still more momentous particulars, with reference to their usefulness in life as wives and mothers. They can neither bake nor brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit. The finest London lady is not more utterly inefficient than they are, for any other object but the one mechanical occupation to which they have been habituated. They can neither darn a stocking nor sew on a button. As to making porridge or washing a handkerchief, the thing is out of the question. Their food is cooked out of doors by persons who provide the lodging-houses in which they dwell--they are clothed from head to foot, like fine ladies, by milliners and dressmakers. This is not the result of fashion, caprice, or indolence, but of the entire concentration of their faculties, mental and corporeal, from their earliest years, in one limited mechanical object. They are unfit to be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any child's mother. We hear little of this from philanthropists or education-mongers; but it is, nevertheless, not the least, because the most generally diffused, evil connected with our manufacturing industry. But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the manufacturing and mining districts of the country, is to be found in the prodigious number of persons, especially in infancy, who are reduced to a state of destitution, and precipitated into the very lowest stations of life, in consequence of the numerous ills to which all flesh--but especially all flesh in manufacturing communities--is heir. Our limits preclude the possibility of entering into all the branches of this immense subject; we shall content ourselves, therefore, with referring to one, which seems of itself perfectly sufficient to explain the increase of crime, which at first sight appears so alarming. This is the immense proportion of _destitute widows with families_, who in such circumstances find themselves immovably fixed in places where they can neither bring up their children decently, nor get away to other and less peopled localities.