In Macclesfield silk-throwing mills were erected in 1756, the manufacture of silk goods and mohair buttons having been already carried on for centuries. The silk throwsters of Macclesfield for many years worked for Spitalfields and supplied them with thrown silk through the London manufacturers. In 1776, it is recorded, the wages paid to the millmen and stewards were 7s. a week, the women doublers 3s. 6d., children 6d. to 1s. The manufacture of broad silk was established at Macclesfield in 1790. We know by inference that many women must have been employed, but information is unfortunately scanty in regard to the social conditions of this trade, so specially adapted to industrial women. It is evident, however, that women kept their place in it, for the apprenticeship rules laid before the Committee on Ribbon Weavers in 1818 expressly included women, both as apprentices and journeywomen. The inherent delicacy of many of the processes, and the fact that silk as a luxury trade is especially susceptible to changes of fashion, have retarded the use of machinery and preserved the finer fabrics as an artistic handicraft. But this, in itself a development to be welcomed, must also indicate that capital and labour can be more advantageously employed in the industries that have evolved more fully on modern lines, for the silk trade is undoubtedly declining in England. _Other Industries._--If information respecting the traditional employments of women in the linen and woollen trades is sparse and unsatisfactory, much more is it difficult to trace out their conditions in other industries of a less "womanly" character. Yet even in such callings it is sufficiently evident that women were employed. Traill's _Social England_ tells us of women making ropes as early as the thirteenth century. Women are known to have worked in the Derbyshire lead mines, _temp._ Edward II. They washed and cleaned the ore at 1d. a day, and were assisted by four girls at 3/4d. a day, men being employed at the same time at 1-1/2d. a day. Mr. Lapsley, in his account of a fifteenth-century ironworks, records that two women, wives of the smith and foreman respectively, performed miscellaneous tasks, from breaking up the iron-stone to blowing the bellows. In 1652 a Parliamentary commission found that many of the surface workers employed in dressing the ore (_i.e._ freeing it from the earth and spar with which it was mixed) were women and children. An _Account of Mines_, dated 1707, tells us that vast numbers of poor people at that time were employed in "working of mines, the very women and children employed therein, as well as the men, especially in the mines of lead." Women worked in coal-mining at Winterton, "for lack of men," in 1581, and with children were employed in the "great coal-works and workhouses" started by Sir Humphrey Mackworth at Neath. They evidently worked underground, as several deaths of women in mine explosions are recorded. In 1770 Arthur