In the silk factories, again, there are two unwholesome processes entirely carried on by women. The first is the drawing of the cocoons, where the hands must be kept constantly in boiling water, and the odor of the putrefying insects constantly fills the lungs; the second is carding the floss, the fine lint of which affects the bronchial tubes. Six out of every eight women so employed die in a few months. Healthy young girls from the mountains soon develop tubercular consumption; and, to complete the dreadful tale, they are kept upon the lowest wages; being paid only twenty cents where a man would earn sixty.[20] The Anglo-Saxons, says the historian, "had not been long settled in England before the more savage of their traits were softened down. The wife continued to be regularly purchased by her husband, and the contract was considered a mere money bargain, long subsequent to the reign of Ethelbert." And why? Not because love was mercenary; but because woman was regarded, in the first place, as a beast of burden, a laborer. In the "Romany Rye," we are told that the sale of a wife with a halter round her neck is still a legal transaction in England. "It must be done in the cattle-market, as if she were a mare; all women being considered as mares by the old English law, and, indeed, called mares in certain counties where genuine old English law is still preserved." Such a sale as this was recently completed at Worcester, and the agreement between the men was published in the "Worcester Chronicle." "Thomas Middleton delivered up his wife Mary Middleton to Philip Rostins for one shilling and a quart of ale; and parted wholly and solely for life, never to trouble one another. "Witness. (Signed) THOMAS × MIDDLETON, his mark. Witness. MARY MIDDLETON, his wife. Witness. PHILIP × ROSTINS, his mark. Witness. S.H. STONE, Crown Inn, Friar St." I have preserved the old expression _mare_ in my quotation, to indicate, not the degradation to which women fell, but that it was as a beast of burden that men regarded her. Several cases of sales, such as is here referred to, have occurred within a few years; but this is the only certificate of transfer that I ever saw. I desire to direct your attention to the remarkable fact, that, of the three parties to it, the wife, who was sold, was the _only_ one who could write her name. The men signed it by a mark.[21] "A generation back," says Cobbett, "it was a common thing to see women, half naked, working like beasts, chained to carts, upon the common roads of England." When Lord Ashley's Commission reported, in 1842, five thousand females were at work, more than a thousand feet below the soil, in the coal-mines of the north of England. These women were nearly naked, and drew trucks, in harness, on all-fours, like beasts of burden. You cannot have forgotten the remarkable description of such women in D'Israeli's novel of "The Sibyl."