to understand the value. If the cry be not
ridiculous enough in the form just quoted,
how does it look thus—for we have it
repeated afterwards in this more piquant way,—
"It seems to be agreed by the common
sense of all concerned who have any common
sense, that our manufactures must cease, or
the factory law, as expounded by Mr. Horner
must give way." We believe it was Mr.
Bounderby who was always going to throw
his property into the. Atlantic, and we have
heard of Miss Martineau's clients being
indignant against Mr. Bounderby as a caricature.
And yet this looks very like him!

The pamphlet then adopts the precise
tone of the mill-owners in speaking of the
accidents as chiefly "of so slight a nature that
they would not be noticed anywhere but in a
special registration like that provided by the
Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred
are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who
rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or
sustains the slightest cut which interferes
with the spinning process for a single day,
has the injury registered under the act." In
the next place the yearly deaths by preventable
accidents from machinery, which number
about forty, are reduced to eleven, by
excluding all machinery except the actual
shafts, and throughout the pamphlet
afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is
used—once in a way that has astonished us, as
it will certainly surprise our readers. Even
lower down on the same page the writer slips
into the statement, that there are only twelve
deaths a-year by "mill-accidents from all
kinds of factory machinery." We wish it
were so; but in the last report, published
before we made our comments, there were
twenly-one slain in six months; one hundred
and fifty had, in six months, lost parts of
their right hands; one hundred and thirty,
parts of their left hands; twenty-eight lost
arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had
bones broken; a hundred had suffered fracture
or serious damage to the head and face.

In the report for the half-year next
following, the deaths by machinery in factories
were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-
one lost the right hand, or, more generally,
parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the
left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and
twenty had bones broken. Thirty-nine,
therefore, was the number of deaths in the
year last reported (a fresh half-yearly report
is at present due), and there was no lack of
accidents more serious than the "rubbing off
a bit of skin." Of the factory accidents, we
are also told, not five per cent are owing to
machinery. If so, great indeed must be the
number of the whole! But it is solely of the
accidents arising from machinery that we
from the first have spoken, since upon
them only the law is founded which we wish
to see maintained.

So far as we can understand the figures of
the pamphlet, they arise from the ingenuity
of some friend, who has eliminated from
the rest those accidents arising out of
actual contact with a shaft, and then put this
part for the whole. But the law says, "That
every fly-wheel directly connected with the
steam-engine or water-wheel, or other
mechanical power, whether in the engine-house
or not, and every part of a steam-engine and
water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near
to which children or young persons are liable
to pass or be employed, and all parts of the
miil-gearing in a factory shall be securely
fenced." The whole controversy is about
obedience to this law, and the consequences,
of resistance to it. The most horrible and
fatal accidents are those connected most
immediately with the shafts; the unfenced shafts
are the essential type of the whole question,
and the fencing of them implies necessarily
the general consent to obey the law. For this
reason we have, no doubt, in common with
other people, frequently represented by such
a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of
resistance to the law, without any suspicion
of the ingenious turn that might be given to
the question on this ground, by an Association
not ashamed to employ sleight of hand in
argument.

And now that we discuss the figures of the
pamphlet, we turn to another of the strange
pages, headed Mis-statements in Household
Words. We make, it is said, the extraordinary
statement, that these deadly shafts "mangle
or murder, every year, two thousand human
creatures; and considering,'' the writer
adds, "the magnitude of this exaggeration
(our readers will remember that the average
of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per
year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with
figures when used in reply to charges so
monstrous. When the manufacturers
produce facts in answer to romance," we proceed,
it is said, "to beg the question as usual; in
this passage: 'As for ourselves, we admit
freely, that it never did occur to us that it
was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing
unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised
or savage.'"

By that admission we abide—and by our
figures we abide. This specimen of our mis-
statements, of our "begging the question as
usual," is a yet more curious example of a
question begged by the accusers, than that other
proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not
having read a document several weeks before it
came into existence. We said, in the passage
above cited, that the deadly shafts "mangled
or murdered" so many persons a-year; that
by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of
the law, two thousand persons were mutilated
or killed. The writer of the pamphlet has been
led to beg wholly the addition of the
mutilated on our side, and to set against it, on her
side, only the killed, and not all those: only a
selection from them of the persons actually
killed on shafts; advantage being taken of
the use of the phrase, deadly shafts, to