The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-04-25

don dry goods merchant, wanting some thirty
working women, was obliged to SEMI away,
not without the help of the police, seven hun
dred women who gathered round his door at
seven o'clock in the morning of q rainy No
vember day And the average number of
governesses in London who apply for places
every day is more than two thousand 1t is
mentioned in the London Times that gem
tleman wanting governess received five
hundred and ten applications! Governesses
in the work houses of England are not un-
common. There are also ten times more
governesses that pass their examinations in
Prussia than are wanted. Yet there is
another fact which, in this connection, it may
seem hard to believes in the very same places
there is an unfulfilled demand for thoroughly
skilled laborers of very many kinds. In uu-
dertaking to show why and how this is, Miss
Marwedel says;-'It used to be said in Ger
many that girl leaving school at fourteen
could support herself" But the influence of
the home and school education Is dependent
on its keeping pace with the wants of the
times; and the German schools, though they
have adopted some improvements, have not
done SO. At the time the above. mentioned
proverb arose all situations for girls of four
teen were supposed to be inside of families.
u But now, when girls are thrown into facto-
ries and shops, unguarded, on their own re-
vs.
feeble and half-developed, not fitted to act
and think Independently, unsupported by the
requisite preliminary knowledge, they pass
from the constraint of school rules to q per-
sonal freedom they do not know how to use.
The necessary consequences are-all the
moral evils to which our poor factory girls
and domestic servants are exposed; and
which, we are too apt to say, are ''the charac-
teristic faults of our time" forgetting that
oil h1zr of
commanding positions, for these same char
acteristics.
We are proud of our hospitals and aims
| houses, of our reformatories and work houses,
of our asylums and regulated prisons, of our
life assurances for the sick and for burial
expenses. But all these things are for the
middle and end of spoiled and infirm lives.
| What blessed change in our moral and social
circumstances it would be if society and the
State should take equally generous care to
invigorate and preserve the uncontaminated
healthy limbs of our youth, especially of our
female youth, and to give moral ripeness to
| their characters We are proud of our schools
as models for other nations but we take our
children out of them when they have re-
| ceived less than nothing for the conduct of
practical life, and most need good examples
and moral protection, neither strengthened in
inner capacity nor outside practical ability,
even when they have, what the majority
never do have, year of regular apprentice
ship. What necessarily must be the lot of
the workingwomen of to-day? Without any
systematic instruction in the majority of
cases, instead of being skilled in labor, in a
hopeless medocrity, their lot is the sorrowful
one of working for any wages; and this is
not all, for the better working power is drawn
down by the iron law of demand and supply
to the same starvation prices. This is not
only true in Germany; the workingwomen of
France, England, and America are suffering
| in the same way.