Chapter LV, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 9 page 3

But besides these, every housewife and every female member of all but the wealthiest families must perforce ply the needle, so that not to the professional operatives in needlework alone, but to almost every living woman the sewing-machine has been a boon of the first importance. How terrible the poverty and wretchedness of the poor seamstress and dressmaker in the years immediately preceding Howe's great invention, every reader of history will know. The dressmaker's hard fate it was too long and in too many cases to have to choose between vice and starvation. In the very year when Howe first seriously set himself to work out his great task, the woes of the poor needlewomen were sung in immortal lines by Tom Hood: -

" With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the song of the shirt."

The poet's words had their effect. Moving the heart and brain of Howe, they caused the creation of the sewing-machine, and put an end for ever to one of the greatest scandals and reproaches of modern civilisation.

The reader who has accompanied us thus far will, perhaps, rise from the perusal of this sketch of the recent march of British industry with extended notions of the powers of the human intellect, and with a keener appreciation of the mental energy of the race to which he belongs. Yet if the first thought be one akin to exultation, he will check it when he reflects on the many serious disorders which still infest our social state, - the wide-spread intemperance, - the too general improvidence and consequent misery, - the alienation between class and class; - and he will form the ardent hope that before the century closes England may be as well furnished with wise and far-sighted guidance in what regards morals and the conduct of life as she is this day in all that concerns her material interests.