By the time that Secretary McCulloch made his advent, the feminine tea-pot had invaded every window-ledge. The Secretary complained of the accumulation of tea-pots in the Treasury of the nation. They vanished, and ceased to distill the gentle beverage for the woman-worker at her noonday lunch. “Nature meant kindly by woman when it made her the tea-plant,” Thackeray says. The presence of her tea-pot was made a mental and moral sign, by political philosophers, that woman was unfit for Government service. Nobody ever heard that the costly cigars and tobacco which filled the man clerk’s “nooning,” to the exhilaration of his body and soul, was a like sign of his inability to perform prolonged service without the aid of stimulants. In war days, when tens of thousands of men were withdrawn from civil labor, and when one day’s expense to the Government equalled a whole year’s in the time of Washington, General Spinner went to Secretary Chase and said: “A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper. I want to employ women to cut the Treasury notes.” Mr. Chase consented, and soon the great rooms of the Treasury witnessed the unwonted sight of hundreds of women, scissors in hand, cutting and trimming each Treasury-note sheet into four separate notes. This was “light work;” but if anybody supposes it easy, let him try it for hours without stopping, and the exquisite pain in his shoulder-joints and the blisters on his fingers will bear aching witness to his mistake. Washington was full of needy women, of women whom the exigencies of war had suddenly bereft of protection and home. In her appointment at that hour, political differences went for nothing. Every poor woman who applied to the good General was given work if he had it. A pair of scissors were placed in her hands, and she was told to go at it. She had no official appointment or existence. During 1862, these women were paid six hundred dollars per annum out of the fund provided by Congress for temporary clerks. A year or two later the working existence of these women was recognized in the annual appropriation bills. After that it did not take long to spread through the land that the Government Departments in Washington offered work to women. The land was full—fuller than ever before of women who needed work to live. Necessity, exaggeration, romance and sorrow, combined as propelling motives, and the Capital was soon overrun with women seeking Government employment. Then, more conspicuously than to-day, the supply far exceeded the demand. The disappointment, the suffering, the sin which grew out of this fact, can never be measured.