ABSTRACT
It is always a satisfaction – indeed, to ourselves it is a personal one – to peruse those simple and touching annals of the poor, the Reports of the ‘Fund for Promoting Female Emigration.’ This institution, as our readers will remember, originated in the public attention which, by means of our Letters on ‘Labour and the Poor,’ was attracted to the condition of the metropolitan needlewomen. The sympathy which Hood’s famous poem 1 was among the first means of evoking was condensed into a practical form chiefly by the energy of an individual whose name is permanently connected with the work of Female Emigration; and Mr. Sidney Herbert’s Fund which has already despatched to the Antipodes as many as seven hundred young females of good character, seems likely to be an important element in the civilization of those great empires which are destined to perpetuate the name and traditions of England, in ages when perhaps our home part in the great social economy of nations shall have been played out. We have no wish to offer an intrusive eulogy on individual exertions; but we cannot refrain from saying that Mr. herbert’s plan owes as much of its steady practical success to his own personal and unswerving attention to its management, as it did in its origin to the prestige of his name and character.
