likes best, in doing good, to follow the example
of a lord. The institution was opened early in the
year, and there resort to it now about sixty needlewomen.
It takes work from shops and families;
is answerable for its safe return, and distributes
it, according to its power, to all women of honest
character who come and ask for means of earning
bread. From the payment received for the work,
it deducts, for expenses, a halfpenny in the shilling
from the out-door worker, and a penny in
the shilling from the in-door worker who has,
in return, work found, house-room, fire, and a
cup of tea. This leaves to the poor needlewoman
much more than she could get if her
work came to her through the hands of an
agent, and this will make the institution self-
supporting, if it be once fairly started with a small
endowment, and be freely used as an Exchange
by needlewomen and their customers. At
present the system is one that enables any average
needlewoman to earn about six shillings a
week, or five and tenpence: some earning more,
and a few less: and this may be roughly
estimated as a shilling a week above their old rate,
besides reduction of an hour or two a day in
times of labour. The institution has a scale of
reasonable market prices for the proper execution
of work sent by private families, and it
provides women to work, at the usual price of
a shilling or eighteenpence a day and their
board, for ladies at their homes. It makes no
vain effort to revolutionise the market price of
labour, but it goes as far as possible towards
securing labour to the needlewoman all the
year round, and the best price it will fetch.

In the house in Lamb's Conduit-street are
airy workrooms; and every applicant for
employment is at first set to earn her money by
doing the work she receives, for two or three
days, in the house, under the eye of a matron.
Her value as a worker becomes known, and if
she need improvement, something is, we believe,
now done for her help to better skill. Thirty or
forty women are now working for twelve hours a
day within the home. They bring their own
dinners, when—as is not always the case—they
have any to bring, and their own bread. But at
tea-time, tea is given them—a fact, perhaps, not
reconcilable with the strictest principles of
political economy, but a kind fact and a good fact
none the less. We peeped in on the comfortable
family tea-table, surrounded by poor isolated
women, whose common distress was the bond of
their kindred, that we should be very sorry to
hear that the kettle ceased to sing its unpaid
song at five o'clock. Besides, do they not pay
their penny in the shilling?

In Needlewoman's Hall, then, there shall be
a mighty kettle, and it shall be the pleasant
labour of the public to support the modest,
hearty efforts of the ladies in Lamb's Conduit-
street, beginning with the public's representative,
the Government. At present that which
might be a little social blessing to poor women,
Government needlework, passes through the
hands of two or three agents, diminishing in
value until the half-crown paid by Great Britain
for the making of a soldier's coat has yielded
eighteenpence to agents and employers, but a
shilling only to the actual maker. The shirt-
maker's pay is, in this manner, reduced by threepence
in the shilling. Government prices paid
to those who earn them—as they might readily
be through Needlewoman's Hall—would at once
secure better employment to a large number of
needlewomen, and afford some protection against
the hunger of slack times: for Government work
is not peculiarly incident to the fashionable
season, and might, indeed, often be reserved
for the slack time. Let Government, then,
set a good example in this little matter—a
little matter of hunger, thirst, sleeplessness,
disease, ruin, and death, to many helpless
women—and let Government see that those who
do the nation's needlework, get their employment
free of murderous abatement in payment.
Were the Government work sent to Lamb's
Conduit-street, much would be done at one
stroke towards the development of Needlewoman's
Hall. There would be no difficulty in
finding requisite security. Lamb's Conduit-
street can rise to the occasion.

Whoever is already in immediate relation
with the needlewomen for whom he or she may
have employment, is already doing all that can
be done for the class in the way of ordinary
business. But whoever, for requisite security
against loss, employs needlewomen through an
agent, who has his own profit to take out of the
weary stitcher's hire, had better change his
system, and help towards the establishment of
Needlewoman's Hall by using the institution in
Lamb's Conduit-street. Let the prudent housewife
who does needlework herself, because she
does not know where to look for a needlewoman
with whose work she will be satisfied, look to
Lamb's Conduit-street, and make her wants
known to the secretary of the institution there.
If anybody wants to endow something with five
or ten pounds, and happens not already to have
sent the five or ten pounds to one or both of
the two prize-fighters, let him give a thought to
the plant and machinery of Needlewoman's Hall.
Again we say, in the name of London and of
everyone of our large towns, Wanted a Needlewoman's
Hall. Let the institution be brought
into busy life, and let its kettle be kept boiling.

ROMAN SHEEP-SHEARING.

THE revenue of the Roman popes as temporal
princes has been but a trifle compared to the
sums they have shorn their sheep of. This
source of income is now drying up. It is a
puny trickling where Niagara has been. In the
old times popes and priests were, like other
men, greedy of gain; and in the moral code of
Europe, there was place given among the virtues
to a pious fraud. The sincere Roman Catholic
of our own day partakes of the knowledge of the
day and its refinement; he avoids, therefore,
wilful deception, even for a pious end. But in
the famous days of Bayard, the most
accomplished chevalier might, for his own gain, break