had already nursed officers and men, took her station at the wheel, and steered by his instructions for Sandy Hook. There the steam-tug "Huntress" found them, the heroic woman at the wheel, the husband at that moment struggling with death; and, when they reached New York, three out of eleven, one of them the suffering wife, survived to tell the tale, and show how a woman can work. So common are such instances becoming, that you have hardly heard the name of this Mrs. Nichols, for whom tender charity soon cared.

A mutiny on board the ship "Maria," of New York, was put down Nov. 10, 1860, by the energy and decision of the wife of the master, Captain Clark, who, with pistols in her hands, threatened to shoot one of the mutineers if he did not desist. He was cowed into submission; and, a signal being made to the revenue cutter, the mutineers were taken into custody. The mate would have been killed, but for the heroic woman's intrepidity.

But all such labor is the result of compulsion,compulsion of barbarism, of slavery, of unfair competition, or dire disease. Let us close this branch of our subject with a picture homely but attractive. "According to thy request," writes a Quaker friend from Wilmington, Del., "I send thee some facts concerning Sarah Ann Scofield. Some fifteen years. since, her father became very much involved in debt. He owed some ten or twelve hundred dollars; having lost largely by working for cotton and woollen mills.

His business was making spindles and fliers. His daughter, then just sixteen, proposed to go into her father's shop and assist him; she being the oldest of seven children. He accepted her offer, and told me himself, that, in twelve months, she could finish more work, and do it better, than any man he had ever trained for eighteen. She earned fifteen dollars a week at the rate he then paid other hands. Her father died. Her two oldest brothers learned the trade of her, and went away. She has now two younger sisters in apprenticeship, and a brother fourteen years of age, all working under her; turning, polishing, filing, and fitting all kinds of machinery. I went out to see her last week. She was then making water-rams to force streams into barns and houses. She is also beginning to make many kinds of carriageaxles. She is her own draughtsman, and occasionally does her own forging. To use her own words, 'What any man can do, I can but try at.' She has a steam-engine, every part of which she understands; and I know that her work gives entire satisfaction. When they have steady employment, they clear sixty dollars a week; and she says she would rather work at it for her bread, than at sewing for ten times the money. The truth is, it is a business she is

fond of."

I have shown you that a very large number of women are compelled to self-support; that the old idea, that all men support all women, is an absurd fiction; and, if you require other evidence than mine, you

may find it in the English courts, under the working of the new Divorce Bill. Nearly all the women who have applied for divorces have proved that the subsistence of the family depended upon them. Out of six million of British women over twenty-one years of age, one-half are industrial in their mode of life, and more than two millions are self-supporting in their industry like men. Put this fact fully before

your eyes.

Driven to self-support, you have seen, also, that low wages and comparatively few and overcrowded avenues of labor compel women to vicious courses for their daily bread. The streets of Paris, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Boston, tell us the same painful story; and in glaring, crimson letters, rises everywhere the question,-"Death or dishonor?" I have shown you that there is encouragement for moral effort, because these women escape from vice as fast as they find work to do. "Have they strength for the conflict," you ask, "or desire to enter such fields?" Find your answer in what they have done from the earliest ages, with the foot of Confucius and Vishnu, of capital and interest, upon their necks. In the lovely lives of Bertha and Ann Gurney, and the powerful attraction of Sarah Scofield, you have found pleasanter pictures whereon to rest your eyes. Let no man taunt woman with inability to labor, till the coal-mines and the metal-works, the rotting cocoons and fuzzing-cards, give up their dead; till he shares with her, equally at least, the perils of manufactures

and the press of the market. As partners, they must test and prove their comparative power.

We must next consider what need woman's moral nature has of work, and what sort of opposition man practically offers her.

IF low wages, by actually starving women and those dependent upon them, force many into vicious courses, so does the want of employment lower the whole moral tone, and destroy even the domestic efficiency of those whose minds seek variety and freedom. More than once have I been to insane asylums with young girls whom active and acceptable employment would have saved from mania; and scores of times have young women of fortune asked me, "What can you give me to do?"

And to this question there is, in the present state of the public mind, no possible answer. No woman of rank can find work, if she do not happen to be philanthropic, literary, or artistic in her taste, without braving the influence of home, or, what is next dearest, the social circle, and earning for herself a position so conspicuous as to be painful to the most energetic. The woman who is prepared for all this will not ask anybody what she is to do: she will take her work into her own hands, and do it.