338 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
“The food was horrible! The mercenary wretches em- 
ployed to grind, and starve, and rot the life out of several 
thousand helpless girls, proved worthy of their employers ! 
They were just as ruthless barterers in human flesh as hell 
could ask, or millionaires applaud ! 
“Since, I. have walked in the track of plague, leprosy, 
cholera, and fever—but I have never seen any thing so 
humiliating to personal dignity—so oppressive to individual 
health—so brutal in regard to the ordinary sympathies as the 
whole system of these mills. The poor children of strength 
and poverty die off, as regularly as the moths of the silk- 
worm, in three or four years at the most—or else they con- 
geal into a sort of old-maid-withered state, which, in its 
wrinkled and horrid distortions, is more monstrous than any 
thing this side the English colliers!—according to Parlia 
mentary Reports ! 
“T could not be a slave! Iwould not be a minion. I left 
the mills—I left my family with the determination to work 
somehow—to redeem the earth from this great evil. 
“This was a vast undertaking for a poor forlorn female. 
But, nevertheless, I had strong feelings that something could 
be done, even by one so humble as myself. But first I had 
to earn my own bread, and as my education had been good, 
and I had read eagerly since my early childhood, I thought 
myself qualified to act as governess, and advertised. I soon 
found a place. It happened to be in a rich and visionary 
family, every member of which nad mounted some particular 
hobby of its own. I thought myself in heaven for awhile, 
but soon began to perceive that hobbies are hobbies. 
“T found this family of world-saviours—for no one of them 
was any thing short!—the most intense se/f-ists I had ever 
met. The only merit they possessed was obstinacy. Each 
one held to his or her opinion with a ludicrous pertinacity, 
and the house was one continuous Babel of controversy. All 
the refgrm topics of the day were thus continually dinned 
