of a young girl is in happy families, all the joyousness of which she is capable, until sorrow sets its seal on her, one’s heart aches for the sad lives of these girls in the city.

’And still her voice comes ringing
Across the soft still air,
And still I hear her singing,
“Oh, life, thou art most fair!"’

“A young girl is capable of feeling in one brief hour more intense delight than a boy of her age experiences in a fortnight.  Yet all this joyousness is ruthlessly stamped upon by competition, and thousands of girls in London have no enjoyment except to gaze at monstrosities in penny gaffs, or to dance on dirty pavements; and generally these poor things are too tired even to do that.  It is strange that the public take so little interest in these girls, considering they must become mothers of future citizens.  ’The youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.’  What sort of daughters are these girls with their pinched faces and stunted bodies likely to give England?  What will posterity say of the girl labor that now goes on in the city?  I have seen strong men weeping because they have no bread to give their children; I know at the London docks chains have been replaced by wooden barriers, because starving men behind pressed so hard on starving men in front, that the latter were nearly cut in two by the iron railings; I have watched a contractor mauled when he had no work to give, and have myself been nearly killed by a brick-bat that was hurled at a contractor’s head by a man whose family was starving:  but I deliberately say of all the victims of our present competitive system I pity these girls the most.  They are so fragile.  Honest work is made for them almost impossible; and if they slip, no one gives them a second chance, they are kicked and spat upon by the public.  I know that the girl-labor question is but a portion of the larger labor question, that nothing can be done for them at present; but I wish that they were not the victims of the laissez-faire policy in two ways instead of one; I wish that their richer sisters were not so terribly apathetic about them.”

For Scotland, industries, wages, and general conditions are much the same as those of England.  Factory life has been at many points improved, and the superior thrift and education of the working-class shows in the large amount of their savings.  But Glasgow has faced conditions almost as terrible as those given in “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” with a result not yet attained by the latter city, having destroyed hundreds of foul tenements to make room for improved dwellings.