distressed or other, can be procured in London by any housewife
to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing. Ask any thrifty
house-mother, high or low, and she will answer. In high houses
and in low, there is the same answer: no _real_ needlewoman,
"distressed" or other, has been found attainable in any of the
houses I frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable
wages, and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of
everywhere; but their sewing proves too often a distracted
puckering and botching; not sewing, only the fallacious hope of
it, a fond imagination of the mind. Good sempstresses are to be
hired in every village; and in London, with its famishing thirty
thousand, not at all, or hardly,--Is not No-government beautiful
in human business? To such length has the Leave-alone principle
carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of
shirtmaking. Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has now got
its apotheosis; and taken wing towards higher regions than ours,
to deal henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for
it!

Reader, did you ever hear of "Constituted Anarchy"? Anarchy; the
choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the
consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity
and baseness, in most of the affairs of men? Slop-shirts
attainable three halfpence cheaper, by the ruin of living bodies
and immortal souls? Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, _our_
divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their
largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call
"prevenient grace"? Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's
_real_ messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the
wasteful time;--preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously