Yesterday I was at the ball, one of a kind—boisterous, glamorous, closely packed, stuffy, charitable.

Spitalfields is a part of London inhabited by silk weavers, descendants and successors of French émigrés who found shelter in Protestant Europe after Louis XIV renounced the Edict of Nantes. Spitalfields weavers, engaging primarily in the production of velvet and colored silk fabric, often suffered losses and deprivation because of the high cost of food in London, of the whims of fashion that preferred cotton, wool, and linen fabric to silk, and, finally, of a considerable amount of smuggling. They suffered the most significant blow from the invention and implementation of mechanical looms which partially replaced human labor. At present, Manchester has seized a manufacturing monopoly, and the other factories in England suffer large losses as a result. The owners of factories, having lost their sales markets, dismiss their workers and make them, with their wives and children, victims to destitution and hunger. This calamity, however, is not immutable, but it changes, like the ebb and flow of the sea. The government is straining its forces to help the poverty-stricken; private individuals take a zealous part in these efforts by giving jobs to silk makers, buying their products, and providing monetary assistance to the most wretched. With this noble goal in mind, they throw magnificent public balls to which all the ladies come in outfits made of Spitalfields fabric, and the funds raised by the ball are given to the poor weavers. Such a ball was held yesterday.

The patronesses of the ball, under the auspices of the king, queen, princes, and princesses of the Royal Family, were ladies of the highest court and city society—the Duchesses of Somerset, Beaufort, Richmond, Northumberland, Sutherland, Marquises of Salisbury, Abercorn, Cornwallis, Londonderry, Countesses of Winchelsea, Chesterfield, Stanhope, Grey, Viscountess Stanley, Lady Peel, the spouse of the Lord-Mayor, and many others.