afterwards taken to the steaming depart

ment?"

"Yes."

"At what age?"

"I believe I was thirteen then."

"Is that a laborious department?"

"Yes."

"At what age were you when you entered upon the night-work?"

"I was nearly fourteen."

"Will you state to the committee the labour which you endured when you were put upon long hours, and when the night-work was added?"

"I started at one o'clock on Monday morning, and went on till twelve o'clock on Tuesday night."

"You say you were taken to be a steamer; are not very stout, healthy youth usually selected for that purpose?"

"Yes; the overlooker said he thought I should be the strongest."

"Were you perfect in your limbs when

you undertook that long and excessive la

bour?"

"Yes, I was."

"What effect did it produce upon you?"

"It brought a weakness on me: I felt my knees quite ache."

"Had you pain in your limbs and all over your body?"

"Yes."

"Show what effect it had upon your limbs ?" "It made me very crooked." Here the witness showed his knees and legs.

"Are your thighs also bent?"

"Yes, the bone is quite bent."

"How long was it after you had to endure this long labour before your limbs felt in that way?"

"I was very soon told of it before I found it out myself."

"What did they tell you?"

"They told me I was getting very crooked in the knees; my mother found it out first."

"What did she say about it?"

"She said I should kill myself with working so long at a time."

"If you had refused to work those long hours, and wished to have worked a moderate length of time only, should you have been retained in your situation?"

"I should have had to go home; I should have been turned off directly."

These miserable young slaves have no power of choice; for if they, or their parents for them, refuse, they are instantly turned off to literal starvation; no parish assistance being allowed to those who resist the regulations of the manufacturers.

"Whenever our boasted trade flows briskly," says Mrs. Trollope, in the story of Michael Armstrong, "they are compelled to stand to their work for just as many hours as the application of the overlooker's strap or billy-roller can keep them on their legs. Innumerable instances are on record of children falling from excess of weariness on the machinery, and being called to life by its las

cerating their flesh. It continually happens that young creatures, under fifteen years of age are kept from their beds all night. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hours of labour out of the twenty-four, are cases which recur continually, and I need not say with what effect upon these victims of ferocious avarice.

"Two hundred thousand little creatures created by the abounding mercy of God, with faculties for enjoyment so perfect that no poverty, short of actual starvation, can check their joy, so long as innocence and liberty be left them; two hundred thousand little creatures, for whose freedom from toil, during their tender years, the awful voice of nature has gone forth, to be snatched away, living and feeling, from the pure air of heaven, while the beautiful process is going on by which their delicate fabric gradually strengthens into maturity; taken for ever, from all with which their Maker has surrounded them, for the purpose of completing his own noblest work; taken and lodged amid stench, and stunning, terrifying

tumult; driven to and fro till their little limbs bend under them, hour after hour, and day after day; the repose of a moment to be purchased only by yielding their tender bodies to the fist, the heel, or the strap of the overlooker!"

This is almost as shocking as anything Mrs. Trollope found in the "Domestic Manners of the Americans."

Let me beg your attention, dear sir, for a moment longer, to this terrible history of early suffering, developed in the evidence on the Factory Bill.

Evidence of Elden Hargrave." In attending to this machine, are you not always upon the stretch and upon the move?"

"Yes, always."

"Do you not use your hand a good deal in stretching it out ?”

"Yes."

"What effect had this long labour upon you?" "I had a pain across my knees and I got crooked."

"Was it in the back of your knees, or the side of your knees?"

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