sensuality, has turned the strongest of the generous, into the most
malignant of the selfish passions.

The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are
not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in
life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating
mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up
utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of
reading or writing, but of ignorance in still more momentous
particulars, with reference to their usefulness in life as wives and
mothers. They can neither bake nor brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit.
The finest London lady is not more utterly inefficient than they are,
for any other object but the one mechanical occupation to which they
have been habituated. They can neither darn a stocking nor sew on a
button. As to making porridge or washing a handkerchief, the thing is
out of the question. Their food is cooked out of doors by persons who
provide the lodging-houses in which they dwell--they are clothed from
head to foot, like fine ladies, by milliners and dressmakers. This is
not the result of fashion, caprice, or indolence, but of the entire
concentration of their faculties, mental and corporeal, from their
earliest years, in one limited mechanical object. They are unfit to
be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any child's mother. We hear
little of this from philanthropists or education-mongers; but it is,
nevertheless, not the least, because the most generally diffused,
evil connected with our manufacturing industry.

But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the
manufacturing and mining districts of the country, is to be found in
the prodigious number of persons, especially in infancy, who are
reduced to a state of destitution, and precipitated into the very