There are yet others, in that land which boasts of its high civilization, who live by carrying to the city immense loads of sand for sixpence a day,--harder work than carrying a hod. Other women may be daily seen collecting fresh manure along the streets and docks of Liverpool. In certain rooms of the great English cotton-mills, the high temperature maintained there compels the women to work in a half-naked condition. This constant exposure of one half the body speedily destroys all feminine modesty. Added to this is an extreme, but unavoidable, filthiness of person. These poor creatures part with their health almost as quickly as with their modesty. They become hollow-cheeked and pale, while their coarse laugh and gestures indicate a deep demoralization. There are many English women engaged in the occupation of nail-making. They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks, drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and dirtiest drudgery is to be done, there they are almost invariably to be found. For wages, they sometimes get tenpence a day, sometimes only sixpence. If they perform overwork, they get a penny an hour,--a penny for the hauling of a canal-boat for an hour! Here is poverty in its most abject condition, and hard work in its most killing form. Their victims are necessarily toilworn, degraded, and hopelessly immoral. It is such extreme destitution that drives women to crime. In an English paper-mill, where the girls worked at counting the sheets in a room by themselves, and made good wages, they were all well-behaved and respectable. In another department of the same mill, where the work was dirty and the wages only a shilling a day, they were almost uniformly of bad character. The base employment degraded them,--the starvation wages demoralized them. Philanthropy has not been deaf to the cries of these unhappy classes, and has made repeated and herculean efforts to improve their condition and reform their morals. But the stumbling-block of excessively low wages was always in the way. It was found, that, until the physical condition was improved, the ordinary wants of life supplied, the moral status was incapable of elevation. I grant that no one item of this long catalogue of calamities has yet overtaken the women of our own country. It would seem that the fact must be, that in other lands the sex is not more degraded than it was centuries ago, but that it has never been permitted to rise to its true level. Once put down, it has always been kept down.