ABSTRACT
A beneficent enterprise which, by the caution and good sense with which it has been planned, promises to succeed, has been organised in the east end of London by Mrs. Heckford. Mrs. Heckford and her husband had before now been well known as the founders of the East London Hospital for Children, a work which we believe was done at her own cost. They began this and the Dispensary for Women, with only ten beds, in an old warehouse which they purchased at Ratcliff Cross: the hospital was afterwards handed over to a committee, and is now doing service of great value in a large and convenient building. Mrs. Heckford worked for many years in the East-end, beginning with nursing cholera patients in 1866, and she has had ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the miserable condition of needlewomen. The system on which they are at present employed, as she points out, reduces these women to abject poverty though high prices may be paid by the purchasers. A woman, for instance, receives one shilling for making an Ulster that costs a guinea, and toils sometimes more than sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, at wages of three-farthings an hour, out of which she has to find needles and thread.
