power of the master manufacturer, or, worse still, of his overseer.

The evils that resulted from this apprenticeship system resembled those springing from slavery. One writer1 says:

"There is abundant evidence on record, and preserved in the recollection of some who still live, to show that, in many of the manufacturing districts, cruelties the most heartrending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the care of the master manufacturers; that they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour, that they were flogged, fettered, and tortured to the most exquisite refinements of cruelty; that they were in many cases starved to the bone whilst flogged to their work; and that, in some instances, they were driven to commit suicide to evade the cruelties of a world where, though born into it so recently, their happiest moments had been passed in the garb and in the coercion of a workhouse. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire, secluded from

1 1 M. Fielden, M.P., 'The Curse of the Factory System.'

the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture and of many a murder."

The Legislature interfered, and in 1802 passed an Act for regulating factories and protecting the apprentices employed in them. This Act was brought in and carried by Sir Robert Peel, the father of the statesman who repealed the Corn Laws, and himself a large manufacturer.

towns.

A further change in the history of manufacture, however, occurred. The steam - engine was invented, and when its power was applied to manufacture, it was no longer necessary to build factories where water-power was at hand; they were henceforth principally established in Apprentices were now but little employed; free, paid child-labour, here to be obtained in abundance, was preferred by the millowners. They had never wished for apprentices; the charge of them had always entailed considerable trouble; the responsibility was felt heavily by conscientious masters, whilst the legal restrictions of Sir Robert Peel's Act prevented the avaricious and hard-hearted from profiting by the abuses of the system. Apprenticeship therefore died a natural death.

It might be thought that children employed under the new plan, receiving wages and living at home under the protection of their parents, would suffer no hardships calling for legal restraint; but representations having been made to the Government that abuses had crept in, a Royal Commission of inquiry was determined upon in 1833.

On this occasion Dr Southwood Smith was appointed by the Government a member of this Commission, conjointly with Mr Tooke and Mr Edwin Chadwick.1

Their first work was to send district commissioners into the manufacturing regions to collect evidence, and the results of those inquiries were embodied in the general Report. My grandfather took a deep interest in the subject, for the evils disclosed by the inspection, if not so great as they had been under the apprenticeship system, were still sufficiently appalling: children, some of them not more than five years old, were obliged to work the same number of

This Commission, for considering the employment of children in factories, preceded by eleven years the one relating to their employment in mines alluded to in the Introduction.

hours as the adult operatives-twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours a day — sometimes the whole night; their health was thus often ruined for life; neither time nor strength remained for education; they were growing up totally ignorant ; and they were, besides, often unkindly treated.

It is sad to see in the Report such words as these, quoted from the children's lips: "I am sick tired, especially in the winter nights." "So tired when I leave the mill that I can do nothing." "I feel so tired when I gang home that I throw myself down, no caring what I does." "So tired I am not able to set one foot by the other." Many a time I have been so fatigued I could hardly take off my clothes at night, or put them on in the morning. My mother would be raging at me, because when I sat down I could not get up again through

the house."

As to their ruined health, such sentences as these foretell it: "Many nights I do not get a wink of sleep from the pain." "My knees failed from the work." Or, "Severe pains would come on, particularly in the morning."

The evidence of the overseers and managers

is scarcely less strong than that of the little sufferers themselves.

One manager says: "I have known the children hide themselves in the wool so that they could not go home when the work was over. I have seen six or eight fetched out of the stove and beat out of the mill."

Another says: "After the children from eight to twelve years old had worked eight or nine. hours, they were nearly ready to faint: only kept to their work by being spoken to, or by a little chastisement to make them jump up. I was sometimes obliged to chastise them when they were almost fainting, and it hurt my feelings; then they would spring up and work pretty well for another hour; but the last two or three hours were my hardest work, for they then got so exhausted.”

And a third manager says: "I have seen them fall asleep, and they were performing their work with their hands, while they were asleep, after the 'billy' had stopped and their work was over."

Two great objections were made to any legislative limitation of the number of hours of chil