recent meeting at Manchester, stated that in
one chemist's shop in Deansgate, two hundred
and fifty gallons were sold in the course of a
year, the same quantity in a shop, one hundred
gallons per annum in another, the same quantity
in a shop in Hulme, and twenty-five
gallons each in two shops in
Chorlton-on-Medlock.

These nurses, to whom the children of the
factory people are entrusted, are either
laundresses or superannuated crones. The more
they drug the children entrusted to them, the
greater number they can undertake to manage.
This consideration acts as a powerful incentive
to drug.

That wholesale death is the result, is fully
proved. Among the gentry in Preston, for
instance, the average number of deaths of
children under five years old was seventeen
per cent; among tradesmen, about
thirty-eight per cent.; and among operatives fifty-five
per cent. Of every one hundred children born
among the gentry, ninety-one reach their first
year; eighty among the trading classes; and
sixty-eight among the operatives. The vital
statistics of Preston for six years show that
no less than three thousand and thirty-four
children were swept away before they had
attained their fifth year, who, had they been
the offspring of wealthy parents, would have
survived that period of their childhood.

But, of all the localities specified in the
return of the Board of Health, Ashton is
the most fatal. The proportion of infant
deaths in this Godfrey's stronghold is thirty-four
per cent. In Nottingham it is thirty-three
per cent.; in Manchester, thirty-two
per cent.; Bolton, thirty-one per cent.;
Leicester, Salford, and Liverpool, thirty per
cent. These towns may be classed as the
head-quarters of factory labour—the localities
where mothers are away from their children
from sunrise till after nightfall. In London
the proportion of infant deaths is twenty-three
per cent.; in Plymouth, twenty-one per
cent.; and in Bath, Shrewsbury, and Heading,
twenty-one per cent. In these places mothers
generally attend to their own offspring. A
vast proportion of the mortality in
Manchester is that of children under the age to
labour in the mills. More than forty-eight
per cent, of the deaths in Manchester are
those of sufferers under the age of five years;
and more than fifty-five per cent, are under
the age of ten years; while in the aggregate
of purely rural districts the proportion
is not more than thirty-three per cent. Dr.
Charles Bell, in the course of a speech
delivered in Manchester, at a meeting convened
to consider the propriety of establishing Day
Nurseries in that town, stated, that "thirty-eight
per cent, of poor children died, who
would not die if they were properly attended
to." Mr. Clay's investigations showed, that,
out of about eight hundred families of
married men employed in the mills of Preston,
the children living in each family averaged
2.7, dead, 1.6; and that seventy-six out of
every hundred had died under five years of
age. Yet this calculation does not give us a full
conception of the ravages which death makes
amongst the children of the poor; inasmuch
as the investigator declares, that, of the eight
hundred families he examined, only one
hundred and thirty-three mothers appeared to be
working.

"We have adduced sufficient evidence,
however, to prove two important facts; namely,
that an extensive system of careless nursing
and criminal drugging is pursued in the
manufacturing towns of England, and that, amongst
those classes by whom this system is carried
on, the rate of mortality is thirty-eight per
cent higher than amongst those classes where
children are properly clothed, fed, and cared
for. Absence of sanatory precautions,
insufficient food, and, in many cases, the nature
of their employment, increase the rate of
mortality amongst the artisan classes; but these,
it would appear, from the mass of authentic
evidence which lies before us, are influences
of minor importance when taken in relation
to the streams of laudanum and aniseed which
stupify their childhood. Much has been
lately written on the degeneration of race in
our manufacturing towns. Many writers
have placed this physical decline to the
account of the loom; but it is fair to interpose
the drugs upon which weavers are
suckled. It is reasonable to attribute the
stunted forms, the bloodless cheeks, the
nerveless limbs, which are to be met in the
great factories of England and France, to the
forsaken cradle rather than to the labour of
the workshop. Mr. John Greg Harrison, one
of the factory medical-inspectors, thus
describes the effect of the drugging system:—

"The consequences produced by the system
of drugging children, are, suffusion of the
brain, and an extensive train of mesenteric
and glandular diseases. The child sinks into
a low torpid state, wastes away to a skeleton
except the stomach, producing what is known
as pot-belly. If the children survive this
treatment, they are often weakly and stunted
for life. To this drugging system, and to
defective nursing its certain concomitant, and
not to any fatal effect inherent in factory
labour, the great infant mortality of cotton
towns must be ascribed."

Those who regard the rapid increase of the
population with dismay, and are prone to
foster any system which tends to diminish
the great circle of the human family, will
perhaps be inclined to throw a veil before this
child-slaughter, and to let the deadly system
effect an extensive emigration of souls from
this world; but to those whose human
sympathies are quickened at a tale of grievous
social wrong committed upon helpless childhood,
who acknowledge fully the sanctity of
life—that life is to be cared for before all
other human considerations—the drugging
system, of which we have faintly sketched an