In Staffordshire, women are employed to paint crockery and china, which they can do with more taste and grace than men. It seems hardly credible, that the desire of the men to keep down their wages should deprive the females of the customary hand-rest; which would, of course, diminish the fatigue, and make the pencil-stroke more certain. I am happy to believe that not an employer in the United States would submit to this absurd demand; and the result of any such attempt on the part of workmen would probably be a general permission to leave. We are, in this country, much more free from the control of guilds and unions of various sorts than the people of England; yet the conduct of our printers furnishes a fair parallel to these foreign facts. Within a few years, there have been more than twenty strikes in printing-offices, consequent upon the employment of a few women; and the result has generally been an entire change of hands, masters in America not enduring dictation. In August of 1854, the journeymen employed in the office of the "Philadelphia Daily Register" left the office, in high dudgeon, because the publisher had employed two women as type-setters in a separate office. They acted in conformity to a resolve of the Printers' Union, and were permitted to depart. But this was not all. Threats of personal violence followed all who sought the waiting work, and an attempt was made to cut the rope by which the forms are raised. The result would have been to break up the type, prevent the issue of the paper, and run the risk of endangering life. Complaints were lodged against the printers; and, after a hearing, they were each held to bail in six hundred dollars, to answer to the charge of conspiracy, at the Court of Quarter Sessions. About the same time, a printer in the same establishment with the "Lily," but working on the "Home Visitor," refused to give some necessary instruction to a girl employed on the first paper. It was found that all the hands had signed an agreement never to work with or instruct a woman! The men, after proper remonstrance, were dismissed, and their places supplied by four women and three men, who worked harmoniously together. That was only five years ago, and now there are hundreds of female printers in Ohio; and one orphan girl has risen from type-setting to an editor's chair and a handsome competence. Jealousy in America sometimes takes a more comical form. Coming home lately from a Female School of Design in another city, I expressed some disappointment at the character of the work and management. A young man in the room spoke of the impossibility of a woman's ever learning to design, in terms so contemptuous that I did not think it worth while to answer him. Making some inquiries, however, in private, I found that his master had often reproached him with _falling behind the women_ at the school; so that personal pique had more to do with the whole thing than any real experience.[22]