The next spring had far advanced, but long storms and late frosts had retarded vegetation, when, with the appearance of the first swallow, hope revisited the heart of the penitent; and a few weeks afterwards, while the nightingale was singing from a lowly bush at its foot, a third time the Oak heard the voice from heaven, more welcome than before, and sweeter than all the sounds in creation beside, saying, “Produce a forest!"-"Thy will be done," replied the humbled tree; and immediately it felt as if a curse had been taken away, and a blessing poured down upon its head.

Ere long its buds unfolded into leaves, and in autumn its branches were bowed with the weight of fruit. Frequent and violent winds scattered the acorns abroad as they ripened, and heavy rains upon the adjacent hills, bringing down the soil upon them, or washing them into temporary channels, many remained buried during the winter; and ere the harvest of another autumn was ready to be shaken from the boughs of the parent tree, a nursery of its descendants was springing up in the neighbouring fields. Year after year the fruits of the Oak were carried further, multiplied thicker, and rose higher, over the face of the country, till at the close of its third century it stood in the heart of the most flourishing forest in the world, itself to the eye still in fulness of vigour and beauty, and unrivalled by the stateliest of its progeny, though the death-wound received a hundred years before was invisibly undermining its strength, and hollowing its trunk.

About this time, the old raven, who still survived, (and like the wandering Jew, it was said of him, that he could neither die nor rest,) returned to that place; but his eye was so dim, and the scenery so changed, that he knew it not again, till the oak, amidst the forest of its sons, saluted him as he flew languidly over their heads. Ralph alighted on one of the arms of his old acquaintance, and silently hearkened to the sequel of its story; at the close of which he fluttered for a moment on his perch, then uttering an ominous croak, fell head-long, and lay dead in the hollow of one of the protuberant roots of the tree, which he supposed had long ago been blasted by lightnings or mildew, for exercising the presumption which he had taught it.

The Oak yet lived two hundred years; its offspring and their descendants to the fiftieth generation, still increasing and multiplying, to the east and the west, to the north and the south, till the river, whose banks it stood, and which for thousands of years had rolled in broad sunshine through a champaign of meadows, became half-overshadowed with the kindred branches that on either side stretched to intermingle their arms, but succeeded not entirely; a line of light, and a current of cool air passing upinterruptedly down the middle of the stream, amidst the depth of the surrounding woodlands. At length came the last hour of the patriarch of trees. It fell not by the fury of the wind like its father, nor by the assaults of the axe, as thousands of its juniors had fallen before it; but on a calm and golden summer-eve, just as the sun went down, the oak sunk to the earth, under the silent weight of years, and at the gentle touch of nature, loosening at once its whole burthen of infirmities: it lay down so

quietly to repose, that the squirrel and her young, whose nest was in the hollow of the fork where the lowest branches diverged from the bole, were undisturbed by the motion, and wondered next morning to find themselves so near the ground. But the remains of the Oak were not left to rot into dust and oblivion; man knew their worth; he removed them, and wrought the knotted fragment of the trunk, and the knee-timbers of the undecayed boughs, into the flanks and the keel of a vessel, which afterwards circumnavigated the globe.

cup of the

Here is a long fable; what is the moral? Take it in the words of the Scripture; they are so brief that they might be written within the acorn, and so important that they ought to be engraven on the tablet of every heart God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the hum

ble."

Sheffield, Feb. 1818.

QUERCUS.

ON ABOLISHING THE USE OF CLIMBLING BOYS.*

THE case of CLIMBING BOYS has of late-been repeatedly discussed; and the humanity of the country has declared, with scarcely a dissenting voice, that their sufferings demand the further protection of the law. That their occupation should be abolished, has been considered by many as a measure neither necessary nor practicable; and such was once my own opinion, A Committee of the House of Commons examined many wit nesses on the subject last year, and came to the conclusion, that nothing short of entire abolition will answer the demands of humanity; and that entire abolition is perfectly consistent with the convenience of the public. A very attentive perusal of the Committee's Report has satisfied me that its conclusion is just; and the reasons which have convinced me may not be without their influence on others. In the following observations there is neither detail nor comment on individual acts of cruelty; it appears quite clear that the practice of cleaning chimneys by Climbing Boys involves in it, of necessity, sufferings so great and continued, and accidents so frequent and dreadful, that it is far more prudent to put the case on general and certain principles, than to rely on single facts. If we insist too much on what has occurred in particular instances, it may be answered, that occasional instances arise out of occasional character.

The legal age at which a child may be employed in sweeping chimneys, is eight years; but there is no doubt that many children of five or six, are purchased from their parents, or purloined from a work house. That, with

• We understand this paper has already appeared in one or two provincial papers; but as the subject is now become one of general interest amongst all classes, and as we consider it well worthy of more extensive circulation, as deeply affecting the interests o a much neglected part of society, it is now presented to our readers, and recommended to the attention of the liberal and humane.

ED.

scarcely an exception, they are forced up the chimney by terror, cannot be doubted.

It is distinctly in evidence before the committee, that the commences ment of their labours is attended with the greatest dread and horror; they are beat, threatened, stripped naked, urged on by boys who pinch their feet, or prick them with pins. We learn from other sources, that straw is burnt under them to hasten their ascent, and of this the consequences. have been fatal-Can we conceive a more dreadful image than that of children of these tender years thus driven up the suffocating funnel of a chimney? Their little limbs seem to be universally distorted, and their flesh lacerated by the roughness of the ascent; yet their sufferings are to know no intermission:-"You must keep them a little at it, during their sores, or they will never learn their business." There are chimneys swept by these wretched creatures, whose aperture does not exceed seven inches square. The narrow chimaeys, it appears, cannot be swept by children of the legal age; and hence the younger apprentices are handed round from master to master for the purpose of doing that every where, which is no where free from danger. These helpless infants, whose years require every care and tenderness, are placed in the hands of the very lowest followers of the trade, as Chimney-sweepers of more ostensible situation and respectable character dare not venture on their illegal service.

In all other trades the master receives a premium-here he gives one; yet even a premium, considerable indeed to the poor man who would receive it, cannot purchase the needful supply. Norwich contains only eight or nine climbing boys, and these travel with their masters for several miles round the city. Colchester has but four, who do the business of the adjacent country for 14 or 15 miles. Can any thing be more decisive of the horror in which this business is held. A starving father may wholly relieve himself from the burthen of supporting a child of five or six years, he may receive a considerable sum of money in addition to this relief-but dread of the trade overcomes every feeling of personal advantage.

The seasoning or initiation of the children may be called the first stage of cruelty. The second stage is much longer, and not less wretched; it comprises the whole period of apprenticeship. The trade of the Chimneysweeper is much overstocked; in London, the number of masters exceeds by one-third what the business to be done calls for, and there is not work for one-half of those who survive their apprenticeship. An overstocked trade is invariably a poor one; hence apprentices in it have not the neces saries of life; and the few journeymen there are, are driven to practices of dishonesty.

It is obvious the Chimney-sweepers' trade must always be overstocked; after 12 or 14, the boys engaged in it are unfit for climbing; when their apprenticeship is concluded, they must either contrive by the purchase or purloining of children, themselves to commence masters, or they must starve; what we may call the middle-man, the assistant, who is neither apprentice nor master, is here nearly unknown. In cases like this we must look for the full force of that principle so little avowed, but so much acted "I inflict on others what I myself have been compelled to endure.”

From a temper callous through suffering, nothing but harshness is to be expected; and when the master is half-starving, how is the apprentice to live? The treatment of apprentices appears to be as follows:-their lodging is in the shed, a "barrack," or a cellar; in ordinary cases they sleep on their soot-bags; straw is a luxury of the better class. In no case are they cleaned more than once in the week; in many cases they remain for months with impurities collecting daily on their bodies; hence that terrible and common disease, the Chimney-sweeper's cancer.

As the Climbing Boys are worked much beyond their strength, whilst their joints are yet flexible, and their bones soft, distortion of limbs and deformity of person are constantly met with. The growth is stinted, the eyes become permanently inflamed, and the sores so constantly arising from accidents in the chimney, are with difficulty healed. Of the accidents which occur in this trade, it is sufficient to say, they are numerous, horrible, and arise of necessity from the practice of using Climbing Boys.

It appears that flues of every dimension, from seven inches square and above, are swept by children. Where the boy is too large for the aperture, he yet sometimes struggles through it with difficulty and danger; his progress is sometimes permanently stopped, and either immediate suffocation follows, or perhaps after remaining for hours pent up in a chimney, he is at length dug out whilst yet living.

It is precisely for the cases where these dreadful accidents occur, those of narrow and horizontal chimneys, that the use of Climbing Boys is wished to be preserved. In ordinary chimneys it is not pretended the machine will not work well; angular points create all the difficulty for the machine; and it is the angular points of small chimnies which create danger for the boy: precisely, therefore, where the practice ought to be abolished, its continuation is demanded.

The cases in which death does'actually ensue may not be numerous, but unquestionably cases of great difficulty and danger do very frequently occur; there scarcely appears to be a Chimney-sweeper who has not himself been repeatedly endangered; and can greater suffering be imagined than that of a boy pent up in a cavity of a chimney, and panting for existence in a suffocating atmosphere? Accidents from burning soot and overheated flues are by no means of rare occurrence; but I do not press on them, as they are not necessary incidents of the trade.

The third stage of cruelty succeeds the apprenticeship: at 16 the unfor. tunate boy is turned out on the world, deformed in shape, disordered in body, without education, and unable to obtain a subsistence; the period of work in his own trade is over, and he knows no other.

If some great national benefit were derived from this inhuman business, the politician, and surely only the politician, might hesitate at its abolition; but what is the greatest pretended advantage that can be derived from its continuance? The more easy cleansing of the one hundredth chimney—as to ninety-nine, the difficulty is already removed; place a Register opening in the hundredth chimney, and there too all difficulty is at an end. The witnesses examined by the Committee of the House of Commons are

unanimous on this point. They every one say, in the present state of the machine, with a register opening, or the occasional removal of a few bricks, there is no chimney whatever which may not be swept WITHOUT the intervention of CLIMBING BOYS.

Let us not be led away by idle misrepresentations; the machine may perhaps have been attempted in our own neighbourhood ; we may converse with the Chimney-sweeper who has tried it, and he is probably full of doubts, difficulties, and objections; but even all partiality on his side removed—can we compare his opinion with that of the witnesses who appeared before the Committee? Of these, one had swept from 600 to 650 chimneys in the preceding year-another, 1313-a third, 631 in 4 months -a fourth, 400 in 10 months. But the ordinary Chimney-sweeper is far. from impartial; he has the spirit of his trade about him; he adheres to the good old customs of those who preceded him; and entertains a revolutionary horror against all innovation.. Did we ever hear of a cook who would use a Rumford roaster, or who would not, the first opportunity, blow up a new-fangled steam-boiler? Would a farmer, 20 years ago, even turn his eyes toward a patent plough, an improved harrow, or a waggon-wheel either broader or lower than the one his father had used? But there are other and in some respects better reasons to be urged by the master-sweep. The machine transfers the labour from his boy to himself and it may chance also to make his trade change hands. The Chimney-sweeper cannot use the machine more readily than any other man, and he must use it far less readily for a while than persons accustomed to mechanical trades will do. If he does lose his business, it must be by his own perverseness; unquestionably if he will not give the machine fair play, others will. Some Chimney-sweepers, it appears, have said, the machine neither would nor should answer; and others have taken care that hours should be employed without any other effect than scattering soot around.

The authorities on which the above observations are grounded, are derived principally from the Report alluded to, and refer, for the greater part, to the city of London; but though the facts are local, the principles are not; and what is inherent in the nature of the trade, cannot be restricted to this town or that county.

It may be decisively asserted, on the whole, that the inherent evils of the system of Climbing Boys are such, as regulation can neither remove nor palliate. Regulate as you please, in an insufficient aperture, the boy must stick fast. No regulation of Parliament can secure humane treatment from a disposition rendered callous by misery; neither can it compel a master, who is himself starving, to provide decently for his apprentice. The inconveniences of abolition are such, as the designing may aggravate, or the uninformed misconceive; but the real state of the case is simply this :-Shall we sanction the most inhuman trade which this country has ever known on its own soil; or shall we compel the owner of the hundredth chimney to cut a ten-inch cavity in his wall, and close the aperture with a door of iron.

York, Feb. 12. 1818.

S. W. N.

VOL. II.

Ce