was not unmitigated. Apart from financial considerations the chief inconvenience arising from a dearth of 'orders' was that it left the ladies leisure for a very entertaining amount of wrangling. We had always understood that it was a common catastrophe for the cooperative associations of workmen to quarrel themselves to pieces, and certainly, but for the mediation of the partners, the shirtmakers would scarcely have escaped that early doom. To form any conception of the bitterness, the fanatical zeal, and disinterested fury of conviction with which a cutter and fitter can debate the set of a shirtfront, one must go back to the history of the early Church and its minuter and abstruser heresies. One might as well expect lucidity from an enraged theologian as from either irate lady a comprehensible statement of the points at issue. We have listened by the hour in fascination to the dramatic contest, but long months elapsed before we had quite learned what was implied by the most derogatory of imputations, that a shirt was tight'—which is not a euphemism for 'tipsy—or before we could venture on our own responsibility to intimate that another appeared 'full to the front.' 'In and out like a dog's hind leg' struck us as a felicitous description of stitching gone astray, and a whole volume of archæological instruction opened itself before us as the cabalistic phrase 'to work for a dead horse' was explained. Dead horse' is work paid for before it is done, and the woman who has booked' and been paid on Saturday for more work than she could finish has the pleasure on Monday and maybe Tuesday of stitching away at work that will bring in no further pay. The phrase is common among shoemakers and tailors, and, according to Mr. Stevenson, is also known to seamen ; according to Wakefield it is an Irish expression, and as such it becomes at once intelligible, though we have to go back to the Brehon laws for its interpretation. One of the abuses attendant on the 'giving stock' by feudal chiefs to their dependants was that the latter were expected to make good the animals that died; and in the similar state of things described by Huc as existing among the Mantchu Tartars, a tyrannical chief will give sick and dying animals to his men to herd and expect them to pay rent accordingly, even for a dead horse. As this discovery dawned on us, we felt that shirtmaking was really an instructive pursuit.

6

That there might be two opinions about its professors appeared from the remarks of our first client, a worthy hosier who had received our business card and opened negotiations by observing that shirtmakers were an infernal lot.' We understood that the lady' from whom he was withdrawing his custom was in the habit of getting drunk unseasonably, and he was kind enough before long to describe our firm as an excellent institution.' We had reason to doubt whether this phrase would have given more satisfaction than the other in the workroom, which was found one morning in a state of

smouldering wrath, verging on rebellion. The fair partner, missing the smiles that used to greet her, looks round for an explanation. At length one bolder than the rest stood forth.

'If you please, Miss, is it true that we are a Dorcas Society?'

'A Dorcas Society! Gracious, no! Who told you that? We are honest shirtmakers, tradesmen, like everybody else.'

'Well, Miss, you see we have to hear on all hands that we are a charity workroom, and please, Miss, if I thought I had to do with a Dorcas Society, I should put on my bonnet and go. This last phrase became proverbial; it resounded through tears in the most impassioned theological debates, and was seldom wholly absent from the more purely domestic differences which broke the monotony of our toils. On one occasion strife had risen high before we intervened; perhaps we were growing idle and inclined to let the ladies fight out their own quarrels for once, but a solemn embassy from the housekeeper invokes our authority. We ask philosophically 'What's the row this time?' and even our large conception of the stumbling-blocks in the way of productive co-operation is enriched by the earnest answer: 'Oh, Miss, it's all about onions in the oven!' The ladies, it should be explained, provide their own dinners, but have them cooked, if they please, in the common kitchen; and we deliver a Solomon's judgment to the effect that the partisans of the energetic bulb' must agree to enjoy their baked meats together, and leave the oven unimpregnated' for the rest between whiles. Sometimes the quarrel would be about a chair. Every one is familiar with the pathetic limitation that makes the so-called 'home' of the poor consist of the furniture for their one room, but there is something still more pitiful in the way the baffled instinct of appropriation fastens upon the worker's seat:' to sit always in the same place becomes a habit and in time a cherished right; if two chairs happen to be alike, a bit of rag or string tied round the back or leg distinguishes the twins, and the worker would be miserable if she thought the tokens were exchanged; one old hand, we had reason to believe, left us after years because a necessary displacement was not broken to her with all needful tenderness and consideration.

The turning-point in the fortunes of the firm came one morning, when the ladies were discussing an advertisement for a marker' wanted at a shop in the Arcade' not previously known to deal in shirts. With more than usual acuteness we reasoned that where garments had to be marked, they must also be made, and a devoted emissary was induced to 'put on her bonnet and go' to apply for the place. Our promptitude was rewarded by finding ourselves almost first in the field for a real good thing in the way of business. After the first step it was comparatively easy to establish a modest connection: to work for one good shop was a recommendation to others, and friendly shopmen and commercial travellers would, from time to time,

give us a hint of new openings, though we set our faces against the wretched system of bribery and treating which is one of the costly accessories of competitive trading. We lived down all suspicions arising from dim rumours of the Dorcas' sort, and-to anticipate a few years-a time came when we were applied to by a shirt-cutter out of place; and on our asking why, as we had not advertised, he explained that he had written to a few leading West-End places on the chance, and he understood 'Hamilton's' was a 'good house.' Ye gods! had any one told us in those early days that we should live to be famed as far off as Fenchurch Street as a good house' in the shirt trade, we should perhaps have perished before our time of gratified vanity.

After a while our principles were put to severe tests; we found rivals willing to bid against us and 'lower the price,' and we let work go from us rather than join in the suicidal competition which paves the operative's as well as the tradesman's road to ruin. We felt at the same time how almost irresistible the temptation must be. There was a day when, borrowing epithets from our friend the hosier, we set on record that the struggle for existence is an infernal process.' We reached the low-water mark of desperation in bad weeks, happily few and far between, in which the old plain workers on our staff were 'setting still' half their time, and found their earnings on the Saturday sink to a miserable 58. or 68. One slack December, necessity proved once more the mother of invention, and we designed a 'fancy' -n'importe quoi--which had a momentary success, and enabled one clever machinist to take home 2l., and buy her consumptive husband a greatcoat. We learned in those vicissitudes to understand how it is that the strugglers for existence are not crushed by the ever-recurring hardships of their lot. Paley thought there was no happiness equal to the intermission of pain, and it is quite true that when, after days of despair, cheerful news greet the ear of a nice lot of work in this morning,' human nature rebounds, and, remembering no more the anguish, the workroom resumes its labours gaily. It is hard for the rich and idle to understand that the jealousies and covetousnesses of the all turn upon the race for work, not the race for poor that the call for self-denial and forethought lies not in accepting work, but in daring to refuse it, to risk present personal privation rather than become a party to enforcing more unfavourable conditions on all the workers in the trade. We could afford to keep a conscience in this respect, but we were rash as well as scrupulous; and that partner, it must be confessed, did not deserve well of the firm who was so far left to herself as to support the excusable demands of a shirtmaker for good prices by irrelevant remarks about wages, and in fact ended by talking rank trade-unionism over the counter to the scandalised hosier's manager.

wages,

and

As a rule, we prudently reserved our theories for the ears of

private customers, who, it is needless to say, had plenty of their own to offer in exchange. We were frequently confronted with Carlyle's problem: How was it that, with all the talk about distressed needlehe could never find a needlewoman, distressed or otherwise,' women, to do a periodical day's sewing at Cheyne Row; and the oftener the question was put, the better we were pleased, as it gave us the opportunity of asking in return, how did Mr. Carlyle and those who quoted him expect the said needlewoman to maintain herself on all the other days of the year when the philosopher's clothes didn't want mending? We pointed out that some ten or twenty families, offering between them not less than 250 days' work to a decent and competent sempstress, would have no difficulty in finding one; but that, without some virtual security for regular employment, any woman in her senses must prefer the poorly paid but constant employment given by the trade, where even the hardest employer will try to find or make a bit of work for his best hands in bad times, to the casual engagements offered in private families, which spend two or three months of every year out of town, and feel unfortunately in no way bound. to enable their needlewoman to earn a year's wages during the nine months for which they need her services.

Other queries were of a more personal character. A young man with historic christian names wanted to know if one of us was any relation of the Miss So-and-so who had written a dismal book about ethics,' and had some difficulty in grasping that the nearest relation was that of identity. One pretty creature with a good sweet face wanted to know if we made shirts for the love of Christ, and as truth forced us to reply it was for the love of shirtmakers, we were fain to hope that our friend had never heard of

Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!),

so that the involuntary plagiarism might at least be innocent of presumption. In truth we found little upon which to pride ourselves in what the charitable were pleased to call our work.' They wished to know if we tried to do our people good. Did we read to them at their work?-a question solved by the sound as of distant thunder overhead, where four sewing-machines kept up a continuous rumble. Did we try to teach them thrift, temperance, and the rest of it?— virtues which, to tell the truth, we felt less likely to abound in our customers and ourselves than among our workers. Did we try to cultivate their intelligence and provide them with higher interests'? -we were, on the whole, more apt to realise our substantial inferiority to every woman with a trade and to exaggerate the intelligence implied in the skill we lacked, while we observed with awe and admiration that, by some inexplicable freemasonry, as news fly through the uninhabited desert, our shirtmakers were generally in a position to give us the earliest intelligence as to the winner of the Derby

or the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, while their comments on current affairs were fully up to the customary standard of intelligence observable, say, in the nine o'clock omnibuses.

Of course we must not allow ourselves to exaggerate. Side by side with an astonishing and admirable amount of patient industry, endurance, kindness to those in trouble and scrupulous professional honesty, our shirtmaking friends have their less amiable traits. The language of workrooms is not select, and we have had to beg that nothing might be said before the children in the room that would not be said before the partners; then there are a few-we are told and can believe a diminishing number, but still some, and those not the least skilled shirtmakers-who, after working steadily for a few weeks or months, disappear some Monday, spend a few days in drinking, and then come back to their work as if nothing had happened, or with a mythical story that no one takes the trouble to question because every one knows what it means. We naturally took a more serious view of these escapades than employers made kind by fellow feeling, and there was less of this with us than in most workrooms, but the offenders we should have most liked to reclaim have a good deal of pride in their lucid intervals, and we found that after one or two lapses they preferred to go elsewhere rather than face our remonstrances. Then, again, the embittering effect of the struggle for existence shows itself in jealousies and wranglings about the disribution of work, each imagining the other to have more than herself of the easiest or the best-paid work, or more than her fair share of the work when there is not enough for everybody. But we always found them ready to respond to an explicit appeal to their sense of reason and justice. A shirtmaker does not believe that two and two will make five if she cries and bothers enough about it;' she does not expect to get forty-nine farthings out of a shilling; and when we found that we were in some cases dividing amongst them more farthings and halfpence for making a particular shirt than our employers paid us for it, the ladies in parliament assembled voted the necessary redistribution and reduction of prices, without, so far as we could judge, thinking us at all to blame for the unamiable limitation of arithmetical possibilities.

Thus from year to year the work went on. Customers multiplied, and were no longer drawn mainly from the ranks of private acquaintanceship. It seemed that, with all our inexperience and blundering, we blundered on the average less than the average tradesman; people who came at first out of goodnature, came again because it suited them. Whether we solved Carlyle's problem to his satisfaction or no, we made his and his brother's shirts. Our first issue of an explanatory circular brought us so many members of the House of Commons as seriously to raise our estimate of the intelligence scattered up and down on both sides in the great national palaver. Men, who in their