"My companion took me to a bridge across a kind of dock, and told me it was known thereabouts as 'The Bridge of Sighs.' There is a constable there on fixed-point duty. Why? _To prevent the women from committing suicide_. The suicides were so numerous, he said, that special precautions had to be taken. And since the constable has been set there, so eager are the women to quit this best of all possible worlds that they have been known to come there at night with a couple of women friends, and to leap into the deep, still water while those friends engaged the constable in conversation. "Do you understand it? The woman has been wronged until she can endure no more; she has sunk till she can struggle no longer; she has been beaten and degraded until she loathes her life--even gin has ceased to buy a respite; or she is too poor to pay for gin, and she drags her broken soul and worn-out body to the Bridge of Sighs, and her friends come down to help her to escape from the misery which is too great for flesh and blood to bear. It is a pretty picture, is it not? While our sweet ladies are sighing in the West End theatre over the imaginary sorrows of a Manon Lescaut or repeating at church, with genteel reserve, the prayer for 'all weak women and young children'--here to the Bridge of Sighs comes the battered drudge, to seek for death as for a hidden treasure, and rejoice exceedingly because she has found a grave." Many of these poor women, perhaps most, are mothers. What kind of environment, what land of stamina can they give their children? "Take care of the women, and the nation will take care of itself." Here is another sketch from the _life_, taken in the chain and nail-making districts of Staffordshire. BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, SHALL "In the chain shops of the Black Country the white man's burden presses sore. It presses upon the women and the children with crushing weight. It racks and shatters and ruptures the strongest men; it bows and twists and disfigures the comeliest women, and it makes of the little children such premature ruins that one can hardly look upon them without tears or think of them without anger and indignation. "At Cradley I saw a white-haired old woman carrying half a hundredweight of chain to the fogger's round her shoulders; at Cradley I saw women making chain with babies sucking at their breasts; at Cradley I spoke to a married couple who had worked 120 hours in one week and had earned 18s. By their united labour; at Cradley I saw heavy-chain strikers who were worn-out old men at thirty-five; at Cradley I found women on strike for a price which would enable them to earn twopence an hour by dint of labour which is to work what the Battle of Inkerman was to a Bank Holiday review. At Cradley the men and the women are literally being worked to death for a living that no gentleman would offer his dogs."