In the first week of January this present year, a poor woman named Martha Duke was brought up at the Thames police office, charged with attempting to commit suicide. She was a poor needle-woman, and found the misery of that mode of life greater than could be borne. Speaking not of this case in particular, but of needlewomen in general, Mr. Burch, the resident medical officer of the London Hospital, stated that “a large number of patients had been under his care, and he had carefully investigated a considerable number of cases, and was satisfied that needle-women were the most ill-paid class of people and the most hard-working on earth. They were miserably paid,” he added, “and he knew that numbers of them, with constitutions broken down, earned from 3_s._ to 4_s._ per week only, and for that scanty pittance were compelled to work from three o’clock in the morning till ten at night. They soon became enfeebled by insufficient diet and over-work, and when broken down either had recourse to suicide or prostitution.” In 1844 the operative tailors instituted an inquiry into the sweating system, and then it was found that there were at the West End 676 men, women, and children working under sweaters, and occupying 92 small rooms, the majority of which measured eight feet by ten. The sweater, it may be as well to state, is the man who contracts with the large houses to supply them with shirts, or clothes, or any other kind of slop work; the more his victims sweat, the more are his gains. The sweater is often a Jew, never a Christian.