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11 they created, by whom are they enjoyed, so much as by the women of the middle and upper classes? And the only return that the most industrious of us know how to make for it all is to sew,—a few hours out of the twenty-four! That is to say, after our education has cost the country millions, we sit down amid surroundings worth hundreds of millions, to compete with the illiterate Irish needlewoman to whom we only give a dollar and a half a day. For plain sewing we will allow her but seventy-five cents, scarcely enough to pay her board in an Irish tenement, and yet few of us will pretend to accomplish as much as she does, since, even if we would, our countless interruptions and distractions prevent us. If, then, we value so low the continuous toil of our sewing-women, what should we be willing to pay for our own fitful industry? It would indeed be curious to know what one lady would give another for the actual labour performed between Monday morning and Saturday night, and yet even this little we are losing. Hitherto men have allowed us at least to make up, if we would, the fabrics they sell us. But this last corner of our once royal feminine domain they are determined now to wrest from us. They have invented the sewing-machine, and already it takes from us not far from five hundred million dollars' worth of sewing annually. Our husbands are clothed entirely from the shops, and in all the large dry-goods firms they have marshalled the pale armies of sewing-girls to ply the wheel from morning till night in the production of ready-made garments for feminine wear also. Those who set the fashions are in their league, and help them to put down private competition by making the designs more and more complicated and artificial, so that professionals only can perfectly execute them, while they have so multiplied the "necessary" articles of dress and housekeeping, and so raised the standard of their adornment, that no woman who does all her own sewing can do anything else. Glad and almost forced to save ourselves time and trouble, we purchase at our husband's expense, as usual, and put not only the profit of the cloth into the