I will not admit that the argument of the political economist has, as yet, any rightful connection with the price of woman's work. "The price of labor will always rise or fall," he says, "as the number of laborers is small or large; and it is because there are too many women for a few avenues of labor that the wages are so low." If man believes this, let him help us to open new avenues, and so reduce the number in any one. But I claim that he has increased the natural difference in his own favor, supposing that there be any such, by laws and customs which cripple woman; and that his own lust of gain stands in the way of her daily bread. Just so in hydraulics, men tell us, that water rises everywhere to the level of its source; but you may raise it a thousand feet higher by the aid of your forcing-pump, or drop it from a siphon a thousand feet below. And a forcing-pump and a siphon has man imposed upon the natural currents of labor. If, in my correspondence with employers last winter, one man told me with pride that he gave from eight to fifty cents for the making of pantaloons, including the heaviest doeskins, he _forgot_ to tell me what he charged his customers for the same work. Ah! on those bills, so long unpaid, the eight cents sometimes rises to thirty, and the fifty cents _always_ to a dollar or a dollar and twenty-five cents. The most efficient help this class of workwomen could receive would be the thorough adoption of the cash system, and the establishment of a large workshop in the _hands of women_ consenting to moderate profits, and superintended by those whose position in society would win respect for labor. When I said, six months ago, that ten Beacon-street women, engaged in honorable work, would do more for this cause than all the female artists, all the speech-making and conventions, in the world, I was entirely in earnest. It is pretty and lady-like, men think, to paint and chisel: philanthropic young ladies must work for nothing, like the angels. _Let_ them, when they rise to angelic spheres; but, here and now, every woman who works for nothing helps to keep her sister's wages down,--helps to keep the question of death or dishonor perpetually before the women of the slop-shop. Why? Because she helps to depress the estimate of woman's ability. What is persistently given for nothing is everywhere thought to be worth nothing. I throw open a door here for some stifled sufferer at the West End: let her open a clothing establishment, and employ her own sex; let her make money by it, and watch for the end. When an Employment Society or a Needle-woman's Friend becomes bankrupt in purse, it is bankrupt in morals and argument as well. The wheels of the world move on the grooves of good management, of success. Set these once firmly underneath, and the outcry against our moral Fultons will be hushed.