In country villages and farming districts, there is a great deal of harmful competition with the girls of the slop-shops, which can never be ended until it is considered respectable for women openly to earn money. The stitching of wallets, hat-linings, and shoe-bindings, the more delicate labor on linen collars and shirt-bosoms, is carried on now not merely by so-called benevolent societies who want to build churches, lecture-rooms, and so on, but by rich farmers' wives, who keep or do not keep servants, in the long, summer afternoons and winter evenings, because it is work that can be done privately, and is sought to supply them with jewelry and dress. If they will not educate their minds by profitable reading, it is earnestly to be desired they should work, but openly, for money, and at such trades as naturally fall to their lot. Herb and fruit drying, distilling, preserving, pickling, market-gardening, may yet lay the foundations of ample fortune for many a woman. I have passed a summer amid lovely landscapes, where the women found neither fruit nor vegetables for their table, but let the brown earth plead to them in vain; while they stitched, stitched, stitched the long hours away, every broken needle bearing witness against the broken lives of women who needed in distant cities, where they stood homeless and starving, the work their sisters pilfered, sitting at their ease beside the hearth-stone. Their ignorance was their excuse. Let it not be ours. And, first, for a few general statements. An indispensable requisite for what the Germans call a "bread study" is, that, for average talent, it should command moderate success. "Of all causes of prostitution in Paris," says Duchâtelet, "and probably in all great towns, none is so active as the want of work, or inadequate remuneration. What are the earnings of our laundresses, seamstresses, and milliners? Compare the price of labor with the price of dishonor, and you will cease to be surprised that women fall. Out of 5,183 prostitutes in Paris, I found that 2,696 had been driven to the streets by starvation; and 89, to feed starving parents or children. That is 300 over one-half of the whole number." "It is well known," writes Miss Craig, in Edinburgh, "how brief is the career that our female criminals run. How they are recruited, it is not hard to guess in a country where there are fifty thousand women working for less than sixpence a day, and a hundred thousand for less than one shilling." When, a few years ago, the "Edinburgh Review" collected the statistics of female labor, it found the wages about half what were paid to men. But no reason was assigned for this difference; only, one master gardener ventured to assert, that women ate less than men!