_Millinery and Dressmaking._--The portion of these instructive volumes which describes the condition of the young women employed as milliners and mantua-makers in our great cities, and especially in London, is, however, that which has left the most painful impression upon our minds--not only because the work of these unfortunate girls is of all the most, severe and unremitting--nor because it is inflicted exclusively upon the weaker sex, and at a period of life the most susceptible of injury from overstrained exertion--nor yet because the actual consequences which are shown to ensue in thousands of cases are so peculiarly deplorable---but because the excess of labor (with all its pernicious and fatal results) is endured in the service, and inflicted in execution of the orders, of a class whose own exemption from toil and privation should make them scrupulously careful not to increase, causelessly or selfishly, the toils and privations of their less favored fellow-creatures--a class, too, many of whom have been conspicuously loud in denouncing the cruelties of far more venial offenders, and in expressing a somewhat clamorous and overacted sympathy with sufferings which cannot for a moment be compared in severity with those which are every day inflicted on the helpless of their own sex, in ministering to their own factitious and capricious wants. The remark may appear harsh, but the evidence before us fully warrants it--that probably in no occupation whatever--not in the printing fields of Lancashire--not, in the lace trade of Nottingham--not in the collieries of Scotland--scarcely in the workshops of Willenhall--most assuredly not in the cotton factories of Manchester, (which a few years ago the fashionable fair of London were so pathetic in lamenting)--can any instances of cruelty be met with which do not "whiten in the shade" of those which every spring and autumn season sees practiced--unreprobated, and till now nearly unknown--in the _millinery establishments_ of the metropolis. The following extracts will show that we are guilty of no exaggeration.--(II, p. 114-122.) "622. It is estimated that there are in London, in the millinery and dressmaking business, at least 1500 employers, and that the number of young people engaged by each employer varies from two or three to twenty-five or thirty-five--the average in each establishment being about ten, making in the whole 15,000; but this does not include journeywomen who work at their own houses, of whom also there are great numbers.