talent and application; while the unfrugal
and shiftless, or the unfortunate, experienced in proportionately
greater degree the severity of living. To mining, fishing, farming,
sheep rearing, fruit cultivation, weaving, seafaring,--the industries
of England other than manufactures,--were added during the seventeenth
century glass manufacture, cotton manufacture, and other industries
which were the foundation of England's material greatness. This
list was greatly augmented during the eighteenth century, and the
development of manufactures of all sorts created the factory towns,
which drew to them, as into a vortex, the populations of the rural
districts, and created many problems of modern society in which female
and child labor are involved.

Among the women in everyday life, social habits were easy and
existence had many elements of contentment. Gossip--which had become
differentiated from scandal, because of a wider variety of subjects to
chatter about than flagitious conduct, occupied a large proportion of
the time of the women. The public gardens and the promenades of the
cities, notably the capital, were as much resorted to as during the
reign of Charles, and there was as keen an interest in the display
of styles and the parade of wealth by the women who rode in their
carriages or were carried in their sedan chairs as formerly there had
been in the conduct of the gilded set of the Restoration.

Society as such had not as yet reached the coherence which it knows
to-day. It was much a matter of classes or sections. The "democracy of
aristocracy," which makes a cross-section of all the social grades and
includes the wealthy, the noble born, the intellectual and the gifted
of all ranks of society, was a later development. It is true that
women of gifts did not have to rely upon patrons for their reputation,
but had direct access to the public and were sustained by their own
worth; nevertheless, the pride of birth was still strong enough to
make those who possessed it hold themselves far above even the most
gifted and talented of the sex who were not born within the narrow
circle of noble society. Yet it was no longer simply the person
garnished with titles of nobility who attracted the popular eye and
was singled out in the crowd; for when women whose only claim to
notice was their saintliness of character and Christian service, or
their philanthropy, or their literary gifts, or their art attainments,
were seen in th