called guilty—of a murder, which he has
spent only five minutes in committing. He
has lived about seven million nine hundred
thousand minutes, during only five of which
he has been committing murder. His guilt is
but a fifteen thousand eight hundredth per
cent. or, as the Manchester chairman would
have put it before his meeting even more
triumphantly in decimals,—decimal nought,
nought, nought, nought, six upon his
innocence. What right has society to hang him ?
Besides, in those thirty years, if he has been
living in towns, and moving much in streets,
he must have come within murdering
distance, at the lowest computation, of three
hundred thousand people whom he has not
hurt. His crime, as an individual we have
already put into figures, and now it appears
that, by as much as one in three hundred
thousand is less than forty-two in seven
hundred thousand, by so much is such a
murderer less justly liable to public interference
than an unfenced shaft. All this is
absurd, of course ; but, in this excessive
absurdity lies the whole weakness of the case
which was triumphantly hailed by the aggregate
meeting at Manchester as an answer to
our trash and poison,—namely, the assumption
that arithmetic will ever work out questions
of moral right and wrong.

The chairman of the Manchester meeting
next justified the preventible accidents in
factories, by comparing them with the much
greater proportionate number of preventible
accidents in coal mines. A man living in
Piccadilly might in the same way consider
himself entitled to pick pockets with impunity,
on account of the very small number of
pick-pockets among the population living in that
thoroughfare, as compared with the population
of Field Lane or Saffron Hill. He went
on to direct attention to the large amount of
preventible misery and death caused by the
neglect of government in the Crimea, and
considered that "a member of a cabinet which
was committing all these mistakes with such
fatal results"—one of a "delinquent government"
—had no right to bear heavily at home
against neglect and delinquencies which were
to be expressed by figures incomparably
smaller. In other words he was of opinion that,
being itself unquestionably answerable for
disorganisation and loss of life on a vast scale in
the Crimea, the government has no just right
to enforce petty authority and a care for your
mere single lives in England ; that, having
destroyed an army abroad, it ought not at
home to regard with terror anything so
trifling as the smash of a few bodies, and the
wrench of a few limbs ; that the country,
having experienced a great preventible
disaster—for which it is indeed taking measures
to find out what persons were immediately
responsible—is bound to clear the road for
every kind of small disaster, and to put up
quietly with anything that is not by more
than ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent. as
bad as the winter afflictions of our troops in
the Crimea !

Most seriously we have to state that we
have here faithfully detailed the entire
argument of the chairman of the National
Association for resistance to the factory law, and
yet he was certainly the most argumentative
speaker at the late aggregate meeting, and
the advocate to whose speech speaker after
speaker pointed most frequently as a
triumphant reply to the "philanthropic writers
and publishers of twopenny publications who
wished to add grist to their mill—so that the
one wrote and the others published for the
prejudices of the people." Even the
prejudices of the people, probably, are less
astonishing than the prejudices of a very little
class contained among them. It was to the
prejudices of, we hope, a very small per
centage of the people (let us by all means
reason by figures) that the chairman appealed
when he summed up with his opinion that
"in looking at these facts, he must say it was
high time to form a National Association of
the factory interests of the three kingdoms."
The National Association formed accordingly,
is now alive, and—may we venture to add—
kicking.

Among the addresses of the other speakers
we find repetitions of the preceding arguments,
and of others to which we have referred on
a previous occasion. The great fire of
Manchester, which was to be caused by fenced
machinery, was not indeed threatened on this
occasion ; but, disobedience of orders on the
part of the men (by no means disobedience
of law on the part of the masters) was of
course duly put forward as the ordinary
cause of accident. There was a good man
known to a good poet who had much to do
with sufferers, "and quite forgot their vices in
their woe." There are reasoners who can
discuss the widows and orphans of mangled
operatives, the disabling for life of hundreds of
men, and the wounds of others, quite forgetful
of their woe, over a setting forth—not of their
vices—but of their trivial faults of carelessness ;
the playfulness of children, who fling
thoughtlessly about, and are admonished by
the tearing off of arms and legs, the
thoughtlessness of a whitewasher who forgets to tuck
his coat tails carefully up, and as a just
consequence is caught by the said tails, dragged
by a shaft, and has his brains dashed out
against a beam. The poet said of his good
man that "to relieve the wretched was his
pride, and ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's
side." The Manchester reasoner prides
himself, in this case, on resistance to attempts
for the relief of wretchedness, which resistance
springs out of a failing of his that
leans not to the side of virtue as in the
three and a half per cents. "From the
return of the coroners in the factory districts,"
the reasoner says, "it appeared that out
of eight hundred and fifty-eight accidents
occasioning loss of life, only twenty-nine, or