moment of swallowing) had become impacted into the wind-pipe, and killed him. There was not a whisper against the honesty or affectionateness of the parents. When the room had been cleared, the Coroner suggested, officially only, the awful question of foul play; but several jurymen at once gave testimony to the character of the father and mother, and the surgeon's evidence was clear. But was it anything short of insane to give a baby red herring to eat, especially a baby that had a cough? Would not the intelligence of a dog or a monkey be supposed equal to the precaution necessary to prevent such a death? One would say so, and yet I have seen intelligent, respectable, educated mothers do things nearly as portentous, in their treatment of their children. We now went out to view the body,' my friend, the surgeon, kindly telling me that I need not share in the 'view' unless I pleased, though I ought to follow. I did follow,-into a wretched tumble-down house, where the first object that met my eyes was a stockingless, squalid, sickly-looking brother of Henry, dragging a pail of water up stairs. On the second floor we found the body,' five days old, in a very small room, where something was frying on a fire, round which some more children, all sickly-looking, were huddled together, to say nothing of an inmate or two besides. I took care not to 'view' the little corpse, and got into the air as soon as I could. We all returned to the parlor of the 'Pig and Whistle,' and agreed upon a verdict of "Died of laryngitis;" the coroner counted out the twelve shillings for the jurymen; and I went home.

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I need hardly say that I was eminently in the mood to think a discontented paper, if not to write one. I had been brought close to a heap of wretchedness and inconvenience, in which there was much that was remediable; much for which the remedy seemed immediately indicable-but not applicable. Thus it is. You may know the young by one invariable sign, (I speak not of the young in years, but of the untried by circumstance, the unworried, unbaulked human creature of every grade,) that they always talk as if to know the cure were to extinguish the disease. A wider experience soon forces upon the most sanguine the recognition that between these two there is a great gulf fixed; and into that gulf sinks, year by year, a larger portion, not necessarily, God forbid, of trust in His laws, but of confidence in ourselves and our puny interferences. I had been to my first Inquest,-I hope my last. I brought away some very vexing but most positive impressions. The whole business of the morning might have been transacted in half-an-hour instead of being allowed to occupy three. Her Majesty's Coroner was a fool; the crier was—a beadle; the jurymen were not only fools, but threeparts of them sots; the mother was a fool; the father was one of those male nonentities whom, in despotic moods, you feel as if you would like to incarcerate, so as to keep them out of social mischief. The manner of life of the poor family was a nausea and a shame; and the proceedings in which I had taken a part were trumpery,

frowsy, and undignified. And the other actual, present, pressing claims upon my activities and my sympathies prevented the only person who seemed to have a sense of all this wrongness from taking a single direct step towards anything better.

Supposing, however, that I had been a despotic monarch, what could I have done? Issue an edict that mothers should not give herring to babies with whooping-cough? Or, turn Henry's father and mother and the fellow-lodgers out of their filthy three-story wigwam, and rase to the ground the same, thereby deducting, perhaps, a third of the income of some other struggler, whose daughter might get upon the streets, and ask me some day from a bed of torture, in a hospital, what right I had to interfere with her father's property? No: but there is one very simple thing which I might then get done,I might have each town parcelled out into districts, with a public hall, for (say) every square mile, in which public business might be transacted with dignity and solemnity. And I might,—and I would, too,-examine my own Coroner, and see that he had a soul above buttons. Yet, upon second thought, I might go wrong there; for, mark you, though a cultivated man may get close to the brain and heart of a clown, the clown generally resents it as a liberty, and, however you may behave, says Hit one of your own size, do!" when you lighten his darkness for him. On the whole, I concluded that I could do nothing but grumble, and leave my moan to be, as we said before, quoting Mr. Carlyle, "added to the eternities," if the eternities should think it worth while to absorb such an item.

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However, a night's sleep "knit up the ravelled sleeve" of my vexations, and the morning sent me to duty gaily enough, with, indeed, more than my usual disposition to see things couleur de rose, and an added experience bought with a headache. Cheap, perhaps, at the price; and certainly not a positively bad bargain.

R.

LIX.-QUESTION PROPOSED BY THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY OF LYONS.

(CLASS OF ARTS AND BELLES-LETTRES.)

"MRS. JAMESON presents her compliments to the Editors of The English Woman's Journal, and has the pleasure of enclosing two documents which she has just received from Lyons, and which she thinks will prove valuable and interesting, as shewing the present state of opinion among intelligent men relative to the condition and wages of the working women in France, and the influence of both on the morals and happiness of the community at large."

Report presented in the name of the Examining Commission. EIGHTEEN centuries have elapsed since Christianity proclaimed the equality of Man and Woman; and yet, notwithstanding, civil and

religious laws have almost everywhere consecrated their inequality. "In spite of the progress of civilization and the softening of manners, no scruple is made, in our time, of treating woman as if she were naturally the inferior of man, and of requiting her services and her labor in the measure of such inferiority.

"Thus teachers, directresses of charitable institutions, of schools, of post-offices, and of shops served by young women,-housekeepers, domestic servants, and work-women in their own rooms or in factories, are paid half the wages earned by men fulfilling analagous functions, or executing the same work.

“It even appears that the rapid developments of civilization, far from ameliorating this sad condition of women, do but aggravate it, in excluding them day by day from functions and from labors which were formerly exclusively their own.

"From this inferior and increasingly precarious position, so contrary to justice and to human dignity, results a crowd of evils, and of disorders physical and moral, which become everywhere more and more manifest, but which are especially afflicting in great centres of industry, such as Lyons, (l'agglomération Lyonnaise). It was incumbent therefore on the Academy of Lyons to call attention and investigation to this serious and melancholy question.

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"I have, in consequence, the honor of proposing to the Academy, as the subject of a prize of 1,200 fr., the following question:

"To investigate, above all from the moral point of view, and to indicate to governors, administrators, master manufacturers, and private individuals, what would be the best means, the most practical measures,

"1st, to raise the wages of women to the same level as those of men, where the same amount of service is rendered or labor performed;

"2ndly, to open new careers to women, and procure for them work which shall replace those employments necessarily taken from them by the competition of men, and the changes in manners and

customs.

"The Reporter to the examining Commission,

"ARLES-DUFOUR."

THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, ARTS, AND BELLES

LETTRES, LYONS.

Question proposed by the section of Arts and Belles-Lettres :"To investigate, above all from the moral point of view, and to indicate to governors, administrators, master manufacturers, and private individuals, what would be the best means, the most practical measures,

་

"1st, to raise the wages of women to the same level as those of men, where the same amount of service is rendered or labor performed;

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“2ndly, to open new careers to women, and procure for them work which shall replace those employments necessarily taken from them by the competition of men, and the change in manners and customs."

“A gold medal, of the value of 1,200 fr., will be decreed to the best paper on the proposed theme.

“The papers must be sent in before the 30th of April, 1859, without fail.

“N.B.—A more explicit programme will be given to those competitors who ask it from M. le Docteur Fraisse, General Secretary of the Class of Literature at the Palais-des-Arts.

"GENERAL CONDITIONS.

"The competitors are forbidden, on pain of exclusion, to make themselves known, directly or indirectly, before judgment is awarded by the Academy. Their papers must be sent, post free, to one of the General Secretaries of the Academy. Each manuscript must be marked at the top by a device, or a motto, repeated on a sealed note containing the name, dwelling, and quality of the author.

"Unless by a formal consent on his part, this note can only be opened on the obtaining, by the author, of the prize for competition, (73rd Article for the government of the Academy). In any case, the manuscript must not be withdrawn under any pretext by the author, who can take a copy if he desires.

“The proposed prize will be decreed in the public session of the Academy following the private sitting of the Examining Board.

"The President of the Academy,

"ROUGIER.

"Lyons, May 18th, 1858."

The General Secretaries,

A. BINEAU, CH. FRAISSE.

To these papers we affix a translation of an article in the Siècle, also sent to us by the kindness of Mrs. Jameson.

tions we are alone responsible.

THE WAGES OF WOMEN.

For the transla

THE Academy of Lyons (Section of Arts and Belles-Lettres) has just opened for competition a question of the highest interest, to which we cannot too urgently call the attention of the public, and more particularly that of thinkers and writers.

The Academy gives a prize of 1,200 fr., of which it thus determines the assignment:

"To investigate, above all from the moral point of view, and to indicate to governors, administrators, master manufacturers, and private individuals, what would be the best means, the most practical measures,

"1st, to raise the wages of women to the same level as those of men, where the same amount of service is rendered or labor performed;

2ndly, to open new careers to women, and procure for them work which shall replace those employments necessarily taken from them by the competition of men, and the changes in manners and customs."

It lay more within the province of the Academy of Lyons than that of any other to draw attention to this question,-a question of far more gravity than superficial minds would be apt to conceive,— for the district of Lyons (l'agglomération Lyonnaise) conceals in its bosom, in consequence of the deplorable situation allotted to working women, unknown griefs and deep wounds affecting the most sacred ties, those of the family. In the workshops to which she is admitted, and from which the competition of men is gradually excluding her, the woman, married or single, hardly gains her daily bread. The greater number of functions which could be usefully undertaken by women are confided to men. It is men who deal with the fashions, laces, and novelties; men who fill a number of light and sedentary occupations in which women, whether young girls or mothers of families, would be more fitly placed.

There is here therefore the question of a social and economical problem of the first order.

The Report presented to the Academy in the name of the Examining Committee affirms that

"Teachers, directresses of charitable institutions, of schools, of post offices, and of shops served by young women,-housekeepers, domestic servants and work-women in their own rooms or in factories, are paid half the wages earned by men fulfilling analagous functions, or executing the same work.

"It even appears," says the honorable Reporter, M. Arles-Dufour, "that the rapid developments of civilization, far from ameliorating this sad condition of women, do but aggravate it, in excluding them day by day from functions and from labors which were formerly exclusively their own.

"From this inferior and increasingly precarious position, so contrary to justice and to human dignity, result a crowd of evils, and of disorders physical and moral, which become every where more and more manifest, but which are especially afflicting in great centres of industry, such as Lyons, (l'agglomération Lyonnaise)."

The Commission is reasonably astonished that "in spite of the progress of civilization and the softening of manners, no scruple is made, in our time, of treating woman as if she were naturally the inferior of man, and of requiting her services and her work in the measure of this inferiority." Such a state of things is the more to be regretted, "because," says the Commission, "it is opposed to that equality of the two sexes proclaimed by Christianity eighteen centuries ago."

Our entire approbation is awarded to aims defined in this manner, and we honor the Academy of Lyons for taking the initiative. We shall make a duty of examining and criticising the papers which will be submitted to it; but this question of the position and salary of women is not among those which can be resolved by statistical data or theoretic considerations. It were in vain to

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