136 WOMAN IN INDIA.
studied dispassionately, I am very far from being prepared to admit that the average Indian woman has any cause to envy her European sister.
Let me take two extreme cases. The Englishwoman in my mind, whom I have actually seen, is a woman aged before her time (for, relatively, child-marriage exists in our own country) and burdened with two or three young children to support. She lived in the East End of London, occupying one small room up a steep and rickety flight of stairs, for which she paid two shillings a week, and considered herself fortunate in being able to earn regularly five shillings and sixpence a week in a cardboard-box factory. And there are thousands of women in London whose weekly wage is not only no more, but often considerably less, as must be the case when ma.tchbox-making is paid at the rate of twopence -half penny a gross, the workers finding their own paste, or mantles with elaborate trimming at six- pence each. Out of wages as scanty as these, the English- woman in winter must find fuel enough to keep something of the cruelly penetrating fog and frost out of her poor apartment; her food, even in its elementary simplicity of tea and bread, is to be bought; her own and her chil- dren's clothes and boots have to be provided, some fur- niture and bedding are a necessity yet the slender pittance must suffice to purchase all. Then turn we to the other instance a poor widow whom I saw at Berhampore. With industrious labour she could earn at reeling the pierced cocoons of silk from half to three quarters of an anna a day, which far more than sufficed for the simple diet of rice, grain, and vegetables which satisfied her. There was a corner for her to sleep in the family hut ; she had nothing to provide towards the feeding and clothing of the children ; the cost of
