It compels women to exert muscular efforts,
to a degree never before required of them. It
is an absolute contradiction to common sense.
Instead of advancing in respect to hygienic
considerations, we have actually gone backward.
It has been seen that the implement
beats the needle in speed, but by a greater
expenditure of muscular power. Now, who
supplies this muscular power? Who, except the
workwoman? And do we fancy that muscular
power is to be had gratuitously, without something
to sustain it? Nothing in this world comes
of nothing. Our bodies are machines, consuming
fuel, quite as much as steam engines are.
There is a close connection between the work
turned off by the human machine, and the
alimentary substances with which it is fed. If you
increase the work, and do not wish exhaustion
and death to be the consequence, you must also
augment the daily allowance of food. If the
labour required be excessive, overtaxing the
supply of strength which the organisation is
able to furnish, a morbid condition of the frame
is speedily induced.

To the increased production which we so much
admire, there corresponds, in fact, an increased
expenditure of the workwoman's strength, which
she must meet by a fuller and more generous
diet. If the fatigue be more than that can resist,
there ensues a derangement of health and a
decay of the natural powers. We can only
transform or transmit force; we cannot create
the strength to lift a feather. Every mode of
exercise we take, costs some grains of alimentary
substance, and we cannot lift our hand to our
head without an expenditure of the provision
laid in at breakfast or dinner.

These facts are confirmed by experiment. In
1866, Dr. Guibout gave the alarm in a report
to the Hospital Medical Society. While
attending the Hospital Saint Louis, he had to
prescribe for several workwomen, whose weakness
and exhaustion were more than suspicious:
these evils were evinced in pale and hollow
cheeks, bowed backs, epigastric pains, &c.
Afterwards, the same symptoms were noticed in the
provinces as well as in Paris. Consumption even
was a possible consequence. It cannot be denied
that the sewing machine may threaten permanent
danger to the workwoman's health and
morality. She must be better fed than ordinary
workwomen; if her earnings do not supply the
means, great cities offer only too many other
resources. Female prisoners who worked at
sewing machines, have not been able to stand
the fatigue with the ordinary prison diet.
They were obliged to be allowed supplementary
rations; broth and boiled beef every day,
roast meat twice a week.

The danger is greatly diminished when the
machine is only employed temporarily or
occasionally. Still, there ought to be limits for
delicate young persons. By the way, similar
symptoms have been observed in young ladies
who regularly practise the piano for several
consecutive hours per day. With sewing
machines, having ascertained the exact cause
of evil, the remedy becomes easier to indicate.
We must consider the sewing machine as a
simple implement; and, like all implements
rapid in their action, we must make it work by
means of a motor.

In large work-rooms, like those of M.
Godillot, where five hundred sewing machines
are at work at once, the motive power
employed is steam. Each workwoman, by means of
a pedal pressing on the communicator of motion,
can regulate the velocity of her machine, or
stop it altogether. But in small establishments
steam is inapplicable, still less in chamber
work. What is wanted to make the sewing
machine uninjurious to health, is to couple
with it a motive power inconsiderable in size,
to be set going or stopped at will, a supplier
of artifical muscular power, dispensing with
that of the workwoman. We want a sewing
machine capable of setting itself agoing. The
desideratum is now realised to such an extent
that it is quite possible for everybody to have
their automaton or self-acting sewing machine.

A French engineer, Monsieur H. Cazal, has
invented a little electric motor which, by its
combination with the sewing machine, resolves
the problem. On touching a button, the
machinery turns, exactly as if an invisible
workwoman were treading the pedals.
Electricity does the work, and the woman
superintends it. A pile stuck in a corner, or
concealed in a footstool, supplies the motive force
required.

The workwoman, to work, must be liberally
fed: the electric motor, too, must be supplied
with victuals, and luckily its digestion is never
out of order, while its appetite is considerable.
The pile is its stomach, which assimilates zinc,
exactly as the steam engine consumes coal.
Electric work costs about thirty times as much
as steam work; notwithstanding which, its
expense is low enough to allow of its employment
in domestic industry.

M. Cazal, by attaching his little motor
directly to the implement, suppresses the
ordinary modes of transmitting force by which
much power is unavoidably lost. He also thus
diminishes the first effort which has to be
made to set the thing a going. Four Bunsen's
elements, for instance, suffice to put the
motor in action. Now each one of these
consumes about the fifth of a pennyworth of
zinc per hour, making the expense for a day
about sevenpence halfpenny or eightpence.
For those who want to work only several
hours per day, a few pence cover the cost.
Now if the workwoman, or her employer,
remembers that she must spend more than
that on extra diet to keep up her strength,
it will be found that there is a manifest advantage
in employing the electric motive power,
not to mention the question of health. Moreover,
there are times when mothers of families
cannot without danger work at a sewing
machine. At such periods, a self-acting
machine will afford invaluable assistance. The
machines, besides, are furnished with pedals,
so that they can be set in action either by
electricity or by human strength. Finally, the