dozen pairs_.

I talked with another young woman, who has made overalls for both these
firms, and has been compelled to give it up through sickness brought on
from the confinement and strained position of sitting so many hours a
day over a sewing-machine. This poor girl told me that both of these
firms were now giving a great part of this class of work to the public
authorities in charge of the House of Correction, to be done by the
prisoners, and that a daily stint for a woman in prison is only eight
pairs. This sick, discouraged girl, in a most heart-breaking way, said
she thought she would better commit some crime in order to procure a
place in the House of Correction, for there she would have much better
quarters, a great deal nicer food, and would only have to make eight
pairs a day, while at home she must force herself to make at least a
dozen pairs a day, or starve.

Fellow-citizens, what do you think of this? Is there not something
wrong in a system of things that permits the authorities of the State
or city to enter into competition with the sewing-women of Boston at
such a cruel and heartless rate that no woman can work at it and keep
out of prison, unless she is assisted by charity? This same South
Boston firm gives out men's shirts to be made at sixty cents a dozen.
The material for one of these shirts costs twenty-three cents, the
making five cents--a total of twenty-eight cents. They retail these
shirts at fifty cents apiece, making a net profit of twenty-two cents
on an investment of twenty-eight cents for a few weeks' time.

During the last few weeks, as I have gone about among these women, my
ears have been haunted with that old song of Thomas Hood, as
appropriate now, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the