about the same age, the third, who had been a
quick little creature, when she was not quite two
years old!

Here the father of the four little children was
in regular work, earning sixty pounds a year,
the mother's earnings were at any rate ten
pounds, and these mechanics, with more than
the income upon which some curates support
families, were thus denying health, and joy, all
use of the faculties, even a stretching of the
limbs, to their sickly babies between two and
eight years old, for the sake of the ten pounds a
year that could be drained out of their
very blood by working them incessantly for
twelve and sixteen hours a day.

"We look," says Mr. Senior, whose new book
on Popular Education furnishes all the facts to
which we are now calling attention "We look
with shame and indignation at the pictures of
American slavery; but I firmly believe that the
children on the worst managed plantations are
less overworked, less tortured, better fed, and
quite as well instructed as the unhappy infants
whose early and long continued labour occasions
the fabulous cheapness of our hardware and
our lace, and whose wages feed the intemperance
of their parents."

Only a year ago, in the district of Willenhall,
a chief bailiff, having occasion to go to his work
before four in the morning, met a little girl not
eight years old in the street, crying bitterly
because she was shut out of the " pot bank." He
said, "It is not nearly time" (six o'clock) "yet."
But she answered, " I ought to have been there
at three, but I slept too long. I was not home
till ten last night."

The correspondent of a school inspector who
tells this, adds, writing on a spring day last year,
"I was at the infirmary this afternoon, to see
some of our people, and asked the house surgeon
if he admitted many cases of disease arising from
the sufferers being sent too early to work. And
he said, 'Oh! constantly, we always expect such
cases; there are two in the house now, one a
lad of ten with a diseased spine. The children
lose all stamina, and carrying a weight of clay
on the head injures the spine. There are many
cases of emaciation and distortion—distortion
more commonly.' And then he added, ' A lad
of sixteen came to me yesterday—I thought he
was eight or nine.'"

Thousands of young children, from seven years
old, work in South Staffordshire about the forge
in the nailmaker's hovel all the long day long.
And no material good comes really to any one of
all this grinding of young life away. The goose
that lays the golden eggs is killed and sold for
drink. A long life of intelligent and healthy
labour is lost to the country for the gain of
weary work extorted from a weakly child.

About Wolverhampton, Willenhall,
elsewhere, there is also a custom of apprenticeship
most painful in its working. A child of tender
years is apprenticed by the parent, who receives
the wages earned under the contract, and the
apprenticeship, whenever it may begin, lasts till
the age of twenty-one. It is enforced by the
magistrates against the child whenever he resists
a contract by which he is bound, though his as-
sent to it was never asked. The apprentice, so
bound, is his master's chattel, and while under
age is inherited, in case of his master's death
by his master's heirs. Such an apprentice has
been sold by one man to another for ten
shillings. He is not seldom let out by a penniless
owner, who receives his hire and pockets the
excess over the contract money due to the
parent. He is punished by blows and " clem-
ming," or starvation. " I will clem your guts
to fiddle strings," is one of the forms of threat
from master to apprentice. " The parents," says
Mr. Horner, writing of Wolverhampton, "count
the money; the employers estimate the work;
the child must do it." Is it too much to ask
that no child be apprenticed while it is under
nine years old, or for more than eight years, and
that it be bound by no contract not made for its
own benefit? That a parent shall not sell or
pawn his child's labour for means of buying
drink?  A pauper child cannot be beaten in hot
blood or by any but one of two constituted
authorities, and then it must be by one, if possible,
always in the presence of the other. An apprentice
of the sort to which we here refer is
absolutely in his master's gripe. For example: A
witness before the Children's Employment Com-
mission, telling of a state of things that has never
yet been amended, said that he " worked as a
journeyman at Robert Jones's, locksmith, about
three months ago. Robert Jones uses his apprentices
shamefully; they are often half-starved;
such victuals as they have pigs wouldn't eat—
not unless something was put to sweeten it.
They have water that grey peas have been
boiled in for breakfast, with a small bit of
bread after, but not half enough; the boys are
always clammed; they have often been to his
house to ask for a bit of pudding. Has seen
Robert Jones beat the boys dreadful; generally
beat, them with a stick; sometimes give them
punches in the face with his fist, till they bled
shamefully. Good boys they were to work, too,
as ever he saw; never impudent to the master;
never turned out a word amiss to their master;
the boys dare not tell anybody. The wife, Mrs.
Jones, is just as bad as the master; she would
lay hold of the hair of the boys before breakfast,
and lug them as long as she could stand
over them; she also punched them in the face
with her fist, like a man fighting with another
man; the boys never turned again; were always
ready to go down on their knees to beg pardon,
so frightened; the more they begged the worse
they were beat." That is an extreme case. But
where the masters and boys belong to the same
class, debased by total want of education, and
of all that is holy in homo influences during
youth, a certain average of hard brutuiity must
needs prevail.

Now, as we before observed, the protection
given to the children employed in factories where
their condition never was so hard as this, and
given against the strongest opposition from
both thinkers and workers, has, as all now