For the first two months, the women earn two dollars and fifty cents _a week_; for the third, three dollars; and, after that, four dollars. The men earn from five shillings to two dollars a _day_. It seems that no special skill is required in the women, while the men in a few departments are still paid according to their ability. The steam-engine, it appears, has not yet learned how to cook dials! In this case, the operator must hold the dial, turning it evenly, as if he were a smoke-jack, which requires judgment and "faculty"! [25] Livingstone's "Africa." Paul Kane's "Travels in the North-west." III. "THE OPENING OF THE GATES." "If such a day never come, then I perceive much else will never come; heroic purity of heart and of eye, noble, pious valor to amend _us and the age of bronze and lacquer_,--how can they ever come?"--T. CARLYLE. "To destroy daughters is to make war upon Heaven's harmony. The more daughters you drown, the more daughters you will have; and never was it known that the drowning of daughters led to the birth of sons." This passage from the treatise of Kwei Chunk Fu upon Infanticide may be translated so as to apply to every Christian nation. The Chinese are not the only people who drown daughters. England, France, and America, the three leading intelligences of the world, are busy at it this moment. The cold, pure wave of the Pacific is a sweeter draught than that social flood of corruption and depression which, like a hideous quicksand, buries your sisters out of your sight. "The more daughters you drown, the more daughters you will have." Most certainly; and if, instead of the word "daughters," you insert the words "weak and useless members of society,"--which is what the Chinese mean by it,--you will see that Kwei Fu is right. Let women starve; let them sink into untold depths of horror, without one effort to save them; and, for every woman so lost, two shall be born to inherit her fate. Nor need the careless and ignorant man of wealth fancy that his own daughters shall escape while he continues heartlessly indifferent, though he never actively wronged a human creature. When the spoiler is abroad, he does not pause to choose his victims. The fairest and most innocent may be the first struck down; for human passions find their fitting type in the persecuted beast of the forest. It is not the hunter alone who feels his teeth and talons, but the first human flesh his lawless members seize. If these things are so, surely it is our duty to consider well this question of work, to suggest all possible modes of relief, and, while waiting for the final application of absolute principles, to help society forward by all partial measures of amelioration; for only partial can they be, so long as the present modes of thought and feeling continue. How little any one person can contribute toward the solution of our difficulties, I am well aware; yet I venture to make a few suggestions.