She has three little children, the oldest four years and the youngest a little over a year. Work as hard as she can, driving her machine until late into the night, she is able to make only five dozen pairs of overalls a week, which, when expressage and breakage of needles are taken out, leaves her two dollars and sixty-five cents. The rent is a dollar and a half, which leaves one dollar and fifteen cents for the food and clothing of a mother and three children. Of course she cannot live on that, and would starve to death if she were not assisted by charity. And yet there is a firm doing business in South Boston mean enough to take advantage of the fact that people living in this part of the city are compelled to pay car-fare or expressage on work secured in the city proper, and so has reduced the price for work given out in South Boston to _fifty cents a dozen pairs_. I talked with another young woman, who has made overalls for both these firms, and has been compelled to give it up through sickness brought on from the confinement and strained position of sitting so many hours a day over a sewing-machine. This poor girl told me that both of these firms were now giving a great part of this class of work to the public authorities in charge of the House of Correction, to be done by the prisoners, and that a daily stint for a woman in prison is only eight pairs. This sick, discouraged girl, in a most heart-breaking way, said she thought she would better commit some crime in order to procure a place in the House of Correction, for there she would have much better quarters, a great deal nicer food, and would only have to make eight pairs a day, while at home she must force herself to make at least a dozen pairs a day, or starve. Fellow-citizens, what do you think of this? Is there not something wrong in a system of things that permits the authorities of the State or city to enter into competition with the sewing-women of Boston at such a cruel and heartless rate that no woman can work at it and keep out of prison, unless she is assisted by charity? This same South Boston firm gives out men's shirts to be made at sixty cents a dozen. The material for one of these shirts costs twenty-three cents, the making five cents--a total of twenty-eight cents. They retail these shirts at fifty cents apiece, making a net profit of twenty-two cents on an investment of twenty-eight cents for a few weeks' time. During the last few weeks, as I have gone about among these women, my ears have been haunted with that old song of Thomas Hood, as appropriate now, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the city of Boston, as it ever has been anywhere, at any time, in the history of human greed. With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread-- Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt; And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"