Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/95

 82 state of female education is due to the multitude of inefficient teachers who thus unintentionally avenge the mean economy of parents. It is hard to say why women should not occupy the counter or the desk, provided that they are expert at accounts. Female taste and intelligence might be profitably engaged in lithography, wood-engraving, modelling, designing for manufacturers, jewellery, watch-making, and delicate metal-work of various kinds. But, that women should devote themselves to such duties, or analogous ones, public opinion must support them by affirming that labour is honourable to all; it must act as though believing it, and facilitate to them the means of labour.

Meanwhile, until the advent of that social millennium, let the woman, eager to escape from social bondage, and anxious for employment, but met everywhere by ungenerous disabilities—if she can muster 10l.—tear off these useless and encumbering rags of gentility, and emigrate to the United States. It would be preferable that she should select the western states to dwell in; but in any of the large cities she will have no difficulty in discovering and obtaining employment on application, provided her attire be decorously neat, and her address modest and unaffected. She will be liable of course to criticism; and she will find some difference between the social habits of a foreign land, and those to which she has been accustomed; but as an Englishwoman she will receive singular kindness, and she will secure all the material comforts and many of the luxuries of life—an improvement certainly on genteel destitution.

If such would be the counsel that the writer would offer to a sister whom, dying, he was about to leave friendless and poor, it becomes a duty to give it to his countrywomen at large under similar circumstances; and, having so acted—liberavit animam. 2em

that dreary part of Pimlico which abuts upon the river Thames, close to Messrs. Cubitts’ great building establishment, the government have lately dropped a little acorn which, in time to come, will, without doubt, develop as government acorns so well know how to do, into a gigantic oak. We allude to the new Military-Clothing Establishment which seems to have sprung up here in a night, vice Weedon, retired. A great quadrangle is already completed, and we suspect that, ere long, a large portion of Messrs. Cubitts’ dominions will be annexed.

We hear so much about England’s little army, that the reader may wonder why the country requires these acres of buildings to contain its very moderate wardrobe; but if we have few fighting-men at home, we forget the growing boys we have to provide for all over the world, and especially in India.

Taking the royal troops, the militia, and our Indian armies, our entire force does not fall far short of 400,000 fighting-men, the clothing and necessaries for the whole of whom have to be issued from this establishment. We were prepared therefore to meet with a wholesale display within these walls, but the reality far exceeded our expectations. For instance, in the fine room we first entered-one 100 feet long by 40 broad—our eye fell upon a solid wall running down its entire length, some 14 feet high and 12 feet thick, substantial enough to withstand a heavy battery. This black-brown-looking mass on a narrower inspection we found to be built up in a very workman-like manner of Bluchers and shoes. Some people tell you that a million is a number of which we have no conception from merely looking at the figures or signs expressive of that quantity, but here we have more than a third of that impossible “sum-tottle” before our very eyes. There are 3S0,000 boots and shoes, of all sizes, built into the brown-looking bastion, that first greeted our eyes, in this Brobdingnagian establishment, and these were not all. At regular intervals, all down this long room, rose what we may perhaps be allowed to call, haycocks of boots—Wellingtons for the cavalry—so disposed with their feet in the centre, and their long upper-leathers hung outward as to form huge cones of leather.

“But,” said we to the commissariat-officer who, obligingly, conducted us round the establishment, “how are soldiers fitted?”

“Oh,” he replied, “we make half-a-dozen sizes, and they are sure some of them to fit.”

It was a simple question, we confess, but it never struck us at the moment that soldiers’ feet never dare to be so far out of regulation as to require fitting. And where, thought we, a twelve-month’s hence may all these shoes be? Possibly the mass either doing goose step, or the ordinary work of the soldier; possibly splashing through fields of gore or trampling down the dead in some European battle-field.

Leaving the boots to the future, however, we enter another room in the basement, built up with long avenues of bales, the light at the end of each vista looking like a mere speck. Each bale, if we examine it, is as hard as a brick, and bound with iron hoops. How many hundred thousand soldiers’ jackets there were in this apartment we forget. Leading out of this are other apartments devoted to artillery, and hussar cloth, great-coats, &c., and an odd room or two filled with hussars’ jackets, and then, again, other long galleries full of soldiers’ trousers. Then there is the store of soldiers’ necessaries. As this peripatetic individual has to carry his house upon his back, his kit, of course, forms a curious collection; but the number of brushes he carries is something absurd. A horse-soldier has no less than eight brushes in his kit,—he ought to be the best brushed individual in Christendom. The infantry-soldier has five, even in these days when pipe-clay is reduced to the minimum. Then there are an infinity of other articles, such as blacking, sponge, button-sticks, &c., which he has to account for at any moment; which is rather hard, seeing that when a man is campaigning—with the enemy perhaps upon him in a night-attack—he can’t always pack his knapsack as leisurely as a traveller leaving an inn. The store of necessaries may be