An advertisement in London for fifty dressmakers brought seven hundred applicants to the door of the warehouse; and, after long waiting, a police-officer brought the employer to explain why they could not all be hired. Sir James Clarke tells us, that the results of the inquiry into the condition of this class of women exceeded in horror those of the factory commission. Eighteen hours a day was the allotted time for work; and nothing but strong coffee enabled them to ply their needles. Fifteen hundred employers keep fifteen thousand girls. In driving times, they work all night. One girl testified that she had worked through the whole Sunday fifteen times in two years. The lace-makers also work from twelve to twenty hours; and, in families where a peculiar "knack" is thought to be transmitted, children are put to this work from the age of two years. There is no regular time for food or sleep in certain stages of the manufacture; and many of these overworked women become vagrants. A terrible letter from a Manchester mantle-maker was lately published, in which she pleads to be permitted to earn twopence an hour, when compelled to work overtime (that is, over twelve hours a day); and says, pitifully, that, if the present regulations go on, nothing but death can save her from dishonor. A Persian traveller, who visited the bazaar in Soho, was greatly shocked when he found that all those young women were earning their own living; and plumed himself on the superior happiness of the women of his own country. What would he have said, could he have followed the clergyman's daughter, as we must do, from a happy home and fine sewing, down, through all the degradations of the slop-shop, to the very gutter? But this is England. Out of two thousand women who work for their daily bread in New York, five hundred and thirty-four receive a dollar a week. "How many men," asks Dr. Chapin, "would keep off death and conquer the Devil on such wages? One woman had to do it by making caps at two cents each! Think of this, women who like to buy things cheap: for, if the veil could be lifted from your eyes, _you_ would see--the angels _do_ see--on your gay, white dresses many a crimson stain; and among the dewy flowers with which you wreathe your hair, the grass that grows on graves!" Seven thousand eight hundred and fifty ruined women walk the streets of New York,--five hundred ordinary omnibus-loads. They are chiefly young women under twenty, and the average length of the lives they lead is just four years. Every four years, then, seven thousand eight hundred and fifty women are drawn from their homes, many of them from simple, rural hearths, to meet this fate. What drives them to it? The want of bread. Last October, two vagrant women came before a Liverpool court, who testified that they had been driven to evil courses by blows, and forced to support in idleness, by their vice, the father of one, and the husband of the other.