ly well finished and a credit to the worker, and, even if the
reward was small, she had pride in the work and her own skill, and did
always her best. But now, what will you? The thing must be cheap,
cheapest. The machine to sew hurries everything, and you find the
workwoman sans ambition and busy only to hurry and be one with the
machine. It is wrong, all wrong, but that is progress, and one must
submit. When the small shops had place to live, and the great _magasins_
were not for ladies or any who wished the best, then it was different,
but now all is changed, and work has no character. It is all the same;
always the machine."

More than once this plaint has been made, and the sewing-machine
accused as the cause of depression in wages, of deterioration of all
hand needlework, and of the originality that once distinguished French
productions; and there is some truth in the charge, not only for Paris,
but for all cities to which needlewomen throng. Machinery has gradually
revolutionized all feminine industries in Paris, and its effect is not
only on the general system of wages, but upon the moral condition of the
worker, and family life as a whole has become to the student of social
questions one of gravest importance. On the one hand is the conviction,
already quoted, that it has brought with it deterioration in every phase
of the work; on the other, that it is an educating and beneficent agent,
raising the general standard of wages, and putting three garments where
once but one could be owned. It is an old story, and will give food for
speculation in the future, quite as much as in the past. But in talking
with skilled workers, from dressmakers to the needlewomen employed on
trousseaux and the most delicate forms of this industry, each has
expressed the same conviction, and this quite apart from the political
economist's view that there must be a return to hand production, if the
standard is not to remain hopelessly below its old place. Such return
would not necessarily exclude machinery, which must be regarded as an
indispensable adjunct to the worker's life. It would simply put it in
its proper place,--that of aid, but never master. It is the spirit of
competition which is motive power to-day, and which drives the whirring
wheels and crowds the counters of every shop with productions which have
no merit but that of cheapness, and the price of which means no return
to the worker beyond the barest subsistence.

Subsis