life; are accumulated in the _well_ of
the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart,
at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous
subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, to redress that
individual horror; as I and all men hope it may. But, alas, what next?
This general well and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin
before night to fill itself anew. The universal Stygian quagmire is
still there; opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready.
Towards the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human ruin
ooze and gravitate as heretofore; except in draining the universal
quagmire itself there is no remedy. "And for that, what is the method?"
cry many in an angry manner. To whom, for the present, I answer only,
"Not 'emancipation,' it would seem, my friends; not the cutting loose of
human ties, something far the reverse of that!"

Many things have been written about shirtmaking; but here perhaps is
the saddest thing of all, not written anywhere till now, that I know of.
Shirts by the thirty thousand are made at twopence-halfpenny each; and
in the mean while no needlewoman, distressed or other, can be procured
in London by any housewife to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing.
Ask any thrifty house-mother, high or low, and she will answer. In high
houses and in low, there is the same answer: no _real_ needlewoman,
"distressed" or other, has been found attainable in any of the houses I
frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable wages, and have
a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of everywhere; but their
sewing proves too often a distracted puckering and botching; not sewing,
only the fallacious hope of it, a fond imagination of the mind. Good
sempstresses are to be hired in every village; and in London, with its
famishing thirty thousand, not at all, or hardly,--Is not No-government
beautiful in human business? To such length has the Leave-alone
principle carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of
shirtmaking. Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has now got its
apotheosis; and taken wing towards higher regions than ours, to deal
henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for it!

Reader, did you ever hear of "Constituted Anarchy"? Anarchy;
the choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the
consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity and
baseness, in