have been
employed in consequence, multitudes who had been previously supported by
their husbands have been compelled to beg for work. The war has
everywhere brought poverty and grief to the humbler classes of American
women.

It is true that in the West, where the foreign population is large, the
German women go into the fields, and plough, and sow, and reap, and
harvest, with all the skill and activity of the men. It is equally true
of other sections of our country, in which no harvests would be
gathered, but for female help. But these are exceptional cases; and
these women can live without working on shirts at five to eight cents
apiece.

While the distress was greatest in our city, some one advertised for two
men, to be employed in a millinery establishment, who were acquainted
with trimmings, and before the day had passed, sixty applicants had
presented themselves for the situation: the men had not become scarcer.
Another shop, which advertised for three girls, at a dollar and a half a
week, "intelligent, genteel girls," as the advertisement read, was so
overrun before night with applications for even that pitiful
compensation, that the proprietor lost his temper under the annoyance,
and drove many away with insult and abuse. If the war gives employment
to women in the fields, it affords an insufficient amount of it in the
cities.

There are more female beggars in our streets, with infants in their
arms, than ever before. The saloons and beer-shops, stripped of their
male bar-tenders, have adopted female substitutes, driven by necessity
to take up with an employment that always demoralizes a woman. The
surgical records of the army show, that, among the wounded brought into
the hospitals, many women have thus been discovered as soldiers. Others
have been detected and sent home, Many of these heroines declared that
they entered the army because they could find no other employment. The
incognito they had preserved was strongly confirmatory of their
truthfulness. These are some of the minor effects of the war upon our
sex. Many have been sadly demoralizing, while probably very few have
been in any way beneficial.

It is one of the curiosities of the study how to improve the condition
of women, that the most eccentric plans have originated with their own
sex. The deportation of girls from England to Australia and other
colonies, where the majority of settlers are single men, is patronized
and presided over by ladi