there is no law hindering their cruel enslavement
to parents or taskmasters who profit by the
destruction for them of all that is life to a
child, and all that is in a child the source of
hope for womanhood and manhood. It is well
if they are required to work only for ten hours
a day; commonly the hours are eleven or twelve,
in many instances their close labour is enforced
for fifteen, sixteen, or even eighteen hours a
day. Exchange of a word or smile is grudged
them as so much taken from attention to the
daily, weary task, and as the hours run on and
the little frames fail with exhaustion, the last
gasps of possible labour are extorted from them
by help of the cane.

Young children—some of them infants—were
employed in some of the details of lacemaking
at Nottingham and elsewhere, when the commission
of inquiry into the manner of employing
children in unregulated businesses made its
report eighteen years ago. There has been no
subsequent, inquiry, but neither has there been any
subsequent improvement. A pamphlet on the
lace trade and Factory Act, written with special
knowledge but a year ago, says, what we know
must be true, that " the abuses complained of
in 1842 are in full bloom in the present day;"
that, the "system of labour in the lace trade,
found by Mr. Grainger in 1842, is practised
with increased vigour and extortion at the
present day;" that, in truth, matters are worse
instead of better. There are five times as many
steam machines; the little children are worked
as of oId; but, under the unrelenting persistence
of steam power, work is really more severe than
when done by hand. And it, is to be observed
that most, of these large steam factories "are
nothing but warrens of separate workshops. Let
off room by room to petty individual manufacturers,
their only advantage is to concentrate in
one spot the vice and misery which, under the
old system, were scattered over a wide space.
The hands employed are, in all respects of age
and sex, identical with those found to be
employed in 1841. At this very day, women,
with girls and boys of tender age, are still toilworn
to death in the twist lace factories,
as ' winders,' ' doublers,' ' threaders,' and
' jackers-off.' And although in warp lace
factories children of such tender years are not
so worked, yet boys from eleven years of age
are employed there watching machines in charge
of men, and working the same hours, whether
ten or twenty, in the day." These children are
untaught, except sometimes at Sunday school
to which they go, when they require fresh air
and rest, and jaded minds and bodies to a
seventh day of work, and where they sit, " boys
and girls of ten, eleven, and thirteen years of
age, languishing in pale decay, far back upon
tile lowest forms, and vainly trying to fix their
attention on the books before them. Poor
children! they have no power of attention.
Their wasted frames are exhausted beyond the
limits of nature. Strength—full, buoyant, youthful
strength—they have never known. Energies
they have none. Patience alone they possess."

Printworks were, like laceworks and many
other branches of industry by which children
suffer, excluded from the operation of the
Factory Act. It was argued that although the
calico printers worked children longer and
harder than the spinners, yet it would be ruinous
to interfere with them, because while the simple
fabric produced by the spinner or weaver is
always saleable, and can be produced by steady
labour all the year round, changes of fashion
affect calico printing. The pattern that yields
large profits in one month may be hardly saleable
in the next, and saleable only at a loss the
next after that. The printer is, therefore,
sometimes idle for weeks, sometimes exposed to
double strain of labour, and as the child is as
necessary a part of the machinery of production
as a linch-pin, it must bear as it can the pressure
that falls equally upon all.

Children were found by the Children's
Employment Commission entering the printworks
as teerers, some between four and five years
old, some between five and six, and many
between six and seven. The teerer must stand by
the block printer with a sieve full of colour
ready to be supplied to the block, before each
stamp of the block upon the cloth. The teerer
is often the block printer's own child, and the
hours of work said to be twelve, are taken, not
uniformly, but by a strain of overtime at the end
of the week, to make up for the loss by the
man's habit of idling and drinking on Monday
and Tuesday. Of children examined, one, when
only five years old, worked between thirteen and
fourteen hours a day. A girl, not six, worked
regularly twelve hours; another girl, six and a
half, sometimes fourteen hours; another between
six and seven, generally thirteen hours, and
sometimes all night. One printer told how he had
worked from Wednesday evening till Saturday
morning:, "and the boy with me all the time; I
was knocked up, and the boy almost insensible."
We read of a child of seven, worked by its father
"from six in the morning till eleven at night for
a week together at an average." Because children
of tender years could earn money for their
parents by employment of this sort, the day schools
were emptied, and childhood sent into slavery
was left to grow up to the manhood and
womanhood that has charge in those districts of
the childhood of the present day.

The consequence of this report was a particular
law passed in 'forty five, to regulate the
labour of children, young persons, and women
employed in printworks. Children under eight
were not to be employed at all; children under
thirteen and females were not to be employed
during the night hours between ten in the
evening and six in the morning. A girl of eight
may, therefore, still be worked from six in the
morning until ten at night; a boy of thirteen
may still be worked from Wednesday evening
until Saturday morning. The same law
included an education clause, requiring one
hundred and fifty hours in the half year of certified
school attendance for an employed child under
the age of thirteen. But there is nothing to