"Sack-sewing, 6_d._ for twenty-five, 8_d._ to 1_s._ 6_d._ per hundred; possible earnings, 7_s._ per week. "Pill-box making, 1s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, 1_s._ 3_d._ a day. "Button-hole making, 1_d._ per dozen; can do three or four dozen between 5 A. M. and dark. "Whip-making, 1_s._ per dozen; can do a dozen per day. "Trousers-finishing, 3_d._ to 5_d._ each, finding own cotton; can do four per day. "Shirt-finishing, 3_d._ to 4_d._ per dozen." So the list runs on through all the trades open to women. A pound a week is a fortune; half or a third of that amount the wages of two-thirds the women who earn in working London; nor are there indications that the scale will rise or that better days are in store for one of these toilers, patient, heavy-eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come, and yet saying among themselves the words already given:-- "There must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. Oh, yes, they must be different." CHAPTER XIV. FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. It is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe that it understood the other. Not only the nation as a whole, however, but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source of bewilderment to the other. That conditions on both sides of the Channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is still unsolved for both England and the Continent, remains a truth, though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that France has solved one or two phases of the equation over which England is still quite helpless. There is a famous chapter in the history of Ireland, entitled "Snakes in Ireland," the contents of which are as follows:-- "There are no snakes in Ireland." On the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the slums of Paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "There are no slums in Paris."