where it is brought to the greatest perfection. But the sale for those refined and expensive sorts of work is limited, and they fear entering into it too deeply; the cheap and common kinds of collars, sleeves, etc., finding by far a readier sale. Therefore, -unlike manufacturers, seeking for their own profit upon the work, the nuns' schools are most sought for by the workers, who there obtain higher prices than they receive at the manufacturers ; where, we have heard, the profits to the proprietors are twenty per cent. at least, crochet work, of all kinds, realising more in England and the colonies than it does in Ireland. Another branch of female employment in this country we must not omit, -we allude to the beautiful fabric known as Limerick lace, and which is now exported all over the civilized world. Indeed, no bride deems her trousseau complete without some article of this light and beautiful texture being contained in it, and very frequently are wedding dresses almost entirely composed of Limerick lace, its price enabling those who consider Honiton, or Brussels, beyond their means,—to obtain it instead. In the city of Limerick, where it is exclusively manufactured, there are are about two thousand females employed in its workmanship; it is wrought in frames, several women embroidering at the same frame, if the article is of large size. The girls who are employed at the manufactories are apprenticed, generally for seven years,-at first only earning about two shillings a week, and when perfect at their trade, their wages not averaging more than from seven to ten shillings a week. Besides the workers, there are also designers employed, whose business it is to draw and invent patterns, which are tacked under the lace, and then traced accurately with the needle upon its surface. This style of needlework however, we may consider altogether local, as we are not aware of its being carried on in any place but the city whose name it bears. There is in the county of Waterford at a small town called Tallow, a school carried on by the nuns of the convent there, for the production of Maltese lace, in the manufacture of which they have arrived at great perfection. Some specimens we have seen, being not inferior to that brought from abroad, and highly creditable to the poor girls who make it, and who we believe are well paid for their work. We are well aware that it is the fashion of the present day, to decry the children of the poor being taught any of the above sorts of work; and the writers and speakers against it argue, that it unfits them for the description of labor they may be required to practise in domestic life. One writer affirms that the generality of females who earn money in this way, seldom know how to spend it, that they can certainly adorn their clothes with tawdry finery, but would be unable to darn or mend them if torn. This is all very well to theorize about, but let him step into any of our cottage homes in the country, or lodgings for the poor in the city, and VOL. I. 2A on questioning the mothers of those girls who are employed in any of these styles of work, he will find her acknowledge with gratitude, that they are now kept from idleness and have consequently learnt domesticity, and that their earnings, small though they be, are of great value to her, and a comfort to themselves. These statements we know to be facts;-and those who would not teach a girl fancy work, seem to forget that as the age progresses, we must progress with it. It was no doubt all very well in the days of our grandmothers, to instruct their daughters in spinning, weaving, and knitting, but the loom has superseded the use of these employments in the present day; and therefore, we can only weave now in romance, and spin in an old ballad. Therefore do we wish good speed to all female industry, no matter of what class it be, only regretting that it is not better paid for, and feeling assured that in time females will show their capabilities for higher and more profitable pursuits, than they have yet attained to. [It is, however, very greatly to be regretted that the domestic manufacture of knitted stockings has so far declined; and we believe that if a receiving shop were set on foot by ladies in London, a ready sale would be obtained for such articles for both sexes. They are more durable and wholesome for winter wear than goods manufactured by machinery; and a re-action having set in among the upper classes, in favor of thick woollen petticoats and Shetland hose, advantage might be taken of the new fashion to found such a depôt, the stockings being collected in Ireland from the cottage homes of the makers by an association of ladies extending over the country. The gathering together of those who once worked in their own dwellings into one large building, under the rule of a steam-engine, possesses, of course, very marked economical advantages; but so grave are the resultant evils to the health, in the case of women and young girls, that the organization of new plans by intelligent ladies is a chance of which we will not despair. Women versus political economy; such a sentence has a hopeless sound, yet it is not hopeless; for the exertions of the upper, by which we mean the educated, class of females, would be a new element in commerce, of which Mr. John Stuart Mill would be the first to approve, and whose results he would admit to be, at present, beyond calculation. Now the manual labor of women is absorbed by the hundred thousand pairs of hands;the moral supervision of women has become almost a nullity in commerce. As the lady sat among her spinning maidens in the olden time, so should she now, in some way, adapt her guardian energies to the welfare of the worker in the vortex of modern trade. ED.] November, 1857. XLIX. THE WORKING OF THE NEW DIVORCE BILL. WE take our greatest blessings very quietly, and particularly when they come in the form of relief from tormenting evils. By the changes in our marriage law much more happiness is caused than belongs to the mere relief of a certain number of sufferers, hitherto hopeless. Those who best know what domestic peace and comfort are and ought to be, are released from the genuine anguish of compassion and shame with which they have regarded the multitude of helpless sufferers who lingered on in misery under our former marriage law. Everybody with whom one speaks of any wretched marriage, at once matches the case with another, which brings up the mention of a third; so that the imagination becomes haunted with images of cursed homes. What could the husband do when his wife deserted his young children, and robbed him, to spend his hard earnings on her paramour? What lot could be so utterly hopeless as that of the deserted wife who was sure to see her husband again, and be stripped of all the fruits of her industry, as soon as she had gathered some comforts about her children? It is no exaggeration to say that life has been darkened and saddened to the best hearts and minds in the community by the frequent evidence and constant knowledge of the intolerable wrongs inflicted, without prospect of remedy, on a multitude of persons unhappily married-or far more than would have been so married if our matrimonial law had been more just and prudent than it was. It is simple truth that life is cheered and brightened to us all by the lifting off of the main burden of oppression and wrong. We shall hear no more of the absolutely unendurable cases; and for all the hardest there is more or less remedy now provided. Moreover, the ground is cleared for the growth of various indirect benefits. Some persons are surprised at the terrible stories that are told to police magistrates, and in the Divorce Courts, by betrayed husbands and oppressed wives; but to most of us the narratives are only too common-place. We do not wonder that there are now 173 petitions for divorce or judicial separation before the Court. We rather expect to find that when the new method of relief becomes understood throughout all ranks, there will be a good deal more to astonish thoughtless hearers. Knowing what wife-beating is in all towns, and profligacy in our rural districts, we may expect an immense amount of petitioning when all classes have learned that wronged husbands and wives have no further to go than the next police magistrate or court of petty sessions to obtain protection for person and property. For some time to come we may expect to hear of increasing numbers of petitions. Then, as the existing mass of cases is disposed of, the number will decline, till the average of unhappy marriages becomes less (as we may fairly hope it will) than it has ever been yet. This discouragement of whole classes of bad marriages is one of the most obvious and one of the most certain benefits of the reform in the law. The swindlers of both sexes, who, by hundreds in a year, marry simple-minded spouses in the working classes in order to obtain the property of their victims, and then desert them, have now received a great check. Hitherto a wife has had no protection from any number of returns of the prodigal, and seizure of her earnings; but now one pillage and desertion only are feasible; and the wife may choose between making him pay towards her maintenance and getting rid of his applications altogether. By the way, there is an omission in the new law which ought to be supplied without delay. Power is nominally granted to the wife to recover from her husband or any creditor of his, any property seized after she has obtained a protecting order, and also double the value of such property, but no power is given to detain the husband or other aggressor at the moment, and thus he may get clear off with the pro-' perty, leaving the destitute wife in no condition to proceed by suit. This being amended, as it no doubt will be, the encouragement to swindling marriages, created under the old law, is very greatly mitigated. Silly women and vain men will still be victims of adventurers, but the wholesale incitement to swindlers to pillage the industrious by means of the conjugal yoke, which the victim cannot escape from, though the thief can play fast and loose with it, is now reduced to something very small. The new law cannot but operate well in regard to the wife-beating order of abuses. The enactments framed to meet this class of offences have not wrought so well as their authors expected. There was nothing in the infliction of special punishment for special violence which could meet the worst evil of wife-beating the premium on concubinage over matrimony in the laboring class. It was so obvious, when attention was once turned full on this order of offences, that the wife's case was hopeless, while the mistress could take care of herself, that the effect on social morality was disastrous. The wife is usually unwilling to accept the protection of the law, because she dreads her husband's vengeance when he comes out of prison, and because she and her children cannot maintain themselves without his leave; whereas the mistress is free at any moment. Now that, under the new law, the wife can get protection for her earnings, after a certain amount of desertion, and a judicial separation after a certain amount of cruelty, the brutal order of husbands will find that they have very little more power over a wife than over a concubine. It will be a matter of some interest now to see whether Irish laborers become even more conspicuous as wife-beaters than they are now. Their priests have always impressed them, and do so now, probably, more zealously than ever, with the indissoluble character of marriage, which the brute-husband understands to mean the eternal slavery of his wife. It has always been surprising to observers that the priests permit so wide a prevalence of this kind of violence among a class who are understood to confess to them, and to be under their spiritual guardianship, more or less; and it will be interesting to observe whether the Irish poor in our great towns avail themselves in any degree of the new law, and whether they become even more notorious than at present for personal violence. The benefit which may hereafter be seen to be the greatest of all those which are accruing under the reform of our marriage law is the full, practical recognition of women as "bread-winners." "We men are the breadwinners, we hear said, not seldom, in the face of all the female teachers, artists, operatives, dressmakers, shopkeepers, authors, and domestics in the United Kingdom. "We men are the bread-winners,' say the sentimentalists, who are ashamed of their female relatives appearing to work, though female earnings usually drop into men's pockets. But the fact is, and has long been, that a vast proportion-some say nineteenth-twentieths— of the women of the kingdom work for their bread, though our laws remain applicable to a very different state of society, to a social state in which nearly every women was maintained by husband, father, mother, or kinsman. The new law of separation protects the industry of the wife, as well as her property acquired from other sources: and the long array of cases of efficient industry already disclosed, ought to impress men with respect for women as workers, and to animate women to work by the incitement of example, and the new comfort of legal protection for their earnings and their efforts to earn. Though we have never objected to the discussion of women's claims to freedom of industry, to educational advantages of every kind, and to all rights which they can prove themselves able to fulfil in the form of duties, we have always held that the only method of progression in women's case, as in all others, is by showing what they can do by urging their claims in the shape of acheivement. No à priori proposition to enable deserted wives to work for their own and their children's maintenance would ever have succeeded; and the whole move would have been laughed down, or wrangled over without result: but the fact that hundreds of deserted wives do actually maintain their families by virtuous industry, and have done so, under the discouragement of a tyrannical matrimonial law, has obtained the recognition of society at large for their rights, and protection of those rights by the law. Whatever else is wanted for the improvement of Englishwomen's state and position must be won in the same way. Let it be discussed, by all means; but, while the talk is going on, let women show by what they do that they have a right to what they claim. Many a toiling, deserted wife who has lately pleaded her case before the magistrate, with no other thought than of her children and their daily bread, may have done more for the elevation of her sex than any number of mere eloquent declaimers. It is certainly not the declaimers, but the working women, who have won the new protection which is blessing the whole country. Lord Cranworth is endeavoring to extend the blessings of the reform by enlarging the provisions of the Act, so as to make the Judge more accessible, and to bring in British subjects residing abroad, and improve the protection afforded to the earnings of deserted wives. There can be no difficulty about the perfecting of a law already proved so good.-Daily News, May 28th. L.-NOTICES OF BOOKS. Legends and Lyrics. A Book of Verses. By Adelaide Ann Procter. It is not often that Nature, in the gifts of genius, shews any favor for man's law of primogeniture, endowing the first-born with the wealth of the father; but Barry Cornwall, and Barry Cornwall's daughter, "Child of my heart! my sweet, belov'd first-born!' prove the exception to the rule. With much of the great songwriter's facile and musical rhythm, and of his subtle and tender perception into the harmonies and discords of life, this poet child of a poet father has yet a distinct utterance of her own, which renders this volume of poems a valuable contribution to the literature of the day, and will ensure for it a place in the hearts of readers yet unborn. No brain-weaving is there here,-no straining of ideas and torturing of words, intellectual harlequinades, with which the spasmodic school of poets has sufficiently tormented itself and its readers. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh;" and it is just such speaking which goes to the heart, and at once enthrones poet, novelist, orator, or preacher, in the affections of all who read or listen. Miss Procter herself thinks and feels, and so appeals to the thoughts and feelings of others. No one can even glance over these poems without seeing at once that a true thing is before him, -that he holds in his hands the genuine utterance of a warm, loving heart; full of sympathy, full of comprehension of things good |