ings, by the familiar and grateful arts which are their constant food, and without which nourishment they perish. An apathy benumbs his spirit. Too frequently the father, enjoying perfect health, and with ample opportunities of employment, is supported in idleness on the earnings of his oppressed children; and on the other hand, when age and decrepitude cripple the energies of the parents, their adult children abandon them to the scanty maintenance derived from parochial relief.

"That religious observances are exceedingly neglected, we have had constant opportunities of ascertaining, in the performance of our duty as Physician to the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary, which frequently conducted us to the houses of the poor on Sunday. With rare exceptions, the adults of the vast population of 84,147, contained in Districts Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, spend Sunday either in supine sloth, in sensuality, or in listless inactivity. A certain portion only of the labouring classes enjoy even healthful recreation on that day, and a very small number frequent the places of worship.

Having enumerated so many causes of physical depression, perhaps the most direct proof of the extent to which the effect coexists in natural alliance with poverty, may be derived from the records of the medical charities of the town. During the year preceding July, 183121,196 patients were treated at the Royal Infirmary-472 at the House of Recovery-3163 at the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary, of which (subtracting one-sixth as belonging to the township of Ardwick) 2636 were inhabitants of Manchester-perhaps 2000 at the Workhouse Dispensary, and 1500 at the Children's, making a total of 28,804, without including the Lock Hospital and the Eye Institution. If to this sum,' says Mr Roberton, engaged in making a similar calculation, we were further to add the incomparably greater amount of all ranks visited or advised as private patients by the whole body (not a small one) of professional men; those prescribed for by chemists and druggists, scarcely of inferior pretension; and by herb doctors and quacks; those who swallow patent medicines; and, lastly,

the subjects of that ever flourishing branch domestic medicine; we should be compelled to admit that not fewer, perhaps, than three-fourths of the inhabitants of Manchester annually are, or fancy they are, under the necessity of submitting to medical treatment.'

"Ingenious deductions, by Mr Roberton, from facts contained in the records of the Lying-in-Hospital of Manchester, prove, in a different manner, the extreme dependence of the poor on the charitable institutions of the town. The average annual number of births, (deducted from a comparison of the last four years,) attended by the officers of the Lying-in Charity, is four thousand three hundred; and the number of births to the population may be assumed as one in twenty-eight inhabitants. This annual average of births, therefore, represents a population of 124,400, and assuming that of Manchester and the environs to be 230,000, more than one-half of its inhabitants are, therefore, either so destitute or so degraded, as to require the assistance of public charity in bringing their offspring into the world.

"The children thus adopted by the public, are often neglected by their parents. The early age at which girls are admitted into the factories, prevents their acquiring much knowledge of domestic economy; and, even supposing them to have had accidental opportunities of making this acquisition, the extent to which women are employed in the mills, does not, even after marriage, permit the general application of its principles. The infant is the victim of the system; it has not lived long, ere it is abandoned to the care of a hireling or neighbour, whilst its mother pursues her accustomed toil. Sometimes a little girl has the charge of the child, or even of two or three collected from neighbouring houses. Thus abandoned to one whose sympathies are not interested in its welfare, or whose time is too often also occupied in household drudgery, the child is ill-fed, dirty, ill-clothed, exposed to cold and neglect; and, in consequence, more than one-half of the offspring of the poor (as may be proved by the bills of mortality of the town) die before they have com

pleted their fifth year. The strongest survive; but the same causes which destroy the weakest, impair the vigour of the more robust; and hence the children of our manufacturing population are proverbially pale and sallow, though not generally emaciated, nor the subjects of disease. We cannot subscribe to those exaggera ted and unscientific accounts of the physical ailments to which they are liable, which have been lately revived with an eagerness and haste equally unfriendly to taste and truth; but we are convinced, that the operation of these causes, continuing unchecked through successive generations, would tend to depress the health of the people; and that consequent physical ills would accumulate in an unhappy progression.

"We have avoided alluding to evidence which is founded on general opinion, or depends merely on matters of perception; and have chiefly availed ourselves of such as admitted of a statistical classification. We may, however, be permitted to add, that our own experience, confirmed by that of those members of our profession, on whose judgment we can rely with the greatest confidence, induces us to conclude, that diseases assume a lower and more chronic type in Manchester, than in smaller towns and in agricultural districts; and a residence in the Hospitals of Edinburgh, and practice in the Dispensaries amongst the most debased part of its inhabitants, enables us to affirm with confidence, that the diseases occurring here admit of less active antiphlogistic or depletory treatment, than those incident to the degraded population of the old town of that city."

We have read Mr Roberton's excellent tract, "Remarks on the Health of English Manufacturers," and he does indeed demolish Mr Senior's assumption, founded, as Mr Sadler remarks, on a series of gross mistakes, that a great improvement has taken place in the health of our manufacturing population. The persons presumptuously calling themselves, par excellence, the Political Economists, are, with the exception of Thomson and Torrens, grossly, shamefully ignorant of statistics. Like the worthies we were dealing with a few pages back, they HAVE NO FACTS; but,

unlike the worthies, they theorize without them, and out of two or three puny observations, proceed, by way of induction, to establish general laws. Such general laws last longer than might be expected, perhaps a few months, and afterwards are never more heard of on this side of the grave. The indefatigable Political Economists forthwith set about making a fresh batch of general laws, which they shovel out of their oven, in a strange state, at once doughy and crusty, hard to the gums, and sour to the palate, and by that small portion of the public, infatuatedly addicted to attempts at fare which, if not impracticable, would prove fatal, "with sputtering noise rejected." A history of their general laws of population, would afford a rich treat to the lovers of the inconsistent, the contradictory, and the irreconcilable; and the most illustrious suicides in that line are Senior and Maculloch. Ultra-mulish and superassinine in obstinacy as is the Stot-a pig being in comparison easy of persuasion,— yet even he has been known, under the influence of the " rung on his hurdies," grimly to change his position, and of a sudden to turn his tail towards the south, that had long been affronted by his snout. The English Poor's Laws did he for a dozen years angrily accuse of being the accursed cause of all the horrors of an excessive population; and for four years has he been as earnestly asserting, that they have been the chief cause of keeping 'population down-two assertions equally wide of the truth. He and Senior are at present delighted, but not astonished, at the health and longevity of the inhabitants of Manchester; and great must be their scorn of their admirer Dr Kaye. Mr Roberton has proved, that "the nature of the present employment of the people of Manchester renders existence itself, in thousands of instances, one long disease." We have seen in the extract from Dr Kaye's pamphlet, from proofs. given by Mr Roberton, that during 1830, the patients admitted at the four great dispensaries amounted to 22,626, independently of those assisted at other charitable institutions, such as the Infirmary, amounting at least to 10,000 more. To this he adds many other calculations, which

the poor, it was 1 in 24. Apply that to Manchester, and of the poor (alas! how numerous !) take the poorest, and what a dismal despotism of death!

But Mr Sadler goes into the very heart of his melancholy subject, and compares the proportion of those buried under and above the age of forty in Manchester (that part of it in which the registered burials are given together with the ages of the interred) with the corresponding interments of the immensely larger cities of London and Paris. What are the results? To every 100,000 interments under forty, there would be above that age, in London 63,666; in Paris 65,109; in Manchester only 47,291,—in other words, 16,375 fewer would have survived that period in Manchester than in London, and 17,818 fewer than in Paris. The operative spinners complain that few of themselves survive forty! It is quite true. Calculating the mean duration of life from mortality registers, it is in London about 32 years, in Paris 34, in Manchester 24 years only! In other towns where the same system prevails, it is still less; in Stockport, it is 22 years only, that town not having increased so rapidly as Manchester from immigration.

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We have already touched incidentally on the Cruelties perpetrated in the Factories. What is a billy-roller? A billy-roller is a heavy rod, from two to three yards long, and of two inches diameter, with an iron pivot at each end. Its primary and proper function is to run on the top of the cording over the feeding cloth. Its secondary and improper function is to rap little children "on the head, making their heads crack, so that you may hear the blow at the distance of six or eight yards, in spite of the din and rolling of the machinery." Mr Whitehead, clothier at Scholes, near Holmfirth, a most respectable and trust-worthy man, tells the Committee, that often when a child, so fatigued as not to know whether it is at work or not, falls into some error, the billy-spinner takes the billy-roller and says, "Damn thee, little devil, close it,' and then smites it over head, face, or shoulders. It is very difficult, he adds, to go into a mill in the latter part of the day-particularly winter,

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when the children are weary and sleepy-and not to hear some of them crying for being thus beaten. young girl has had the end of a billyroller jammed through her cheek; and a woman in Holmfirth was beaten to death. We have been taking another glance over the cruelties, as described by scores of witnesses, not a few of whom had been sufferers, but any detailed account of them would be sickening-so we refrain. Suffice it to say, that unless the witnesses be all liars of the first magnitude, the billy-roller is in active employment in many factories-that black-strap is at frequent work in them all-that cuffs from open and blows from clenched hands are plentiful as blackberries-that samples are shewn of every species of shaking-and that there is no dearth of that perhaps most brutal of all beastly punishment, kicking.

To be billy-rollered or strapped, after perhaps having been bucketed for falling asleep, is bad to endure; still it seems to be insensate matter that gives the pain-wood or leather. A blow from the fist is hateful; yet the hand being in common use, the degradation is not in such cases utter. The boy wipes his bloody nose, and he forgives the fist of the overlooker. But a foot-a large, stinking, splay-foot-flung suddenly out "with a fung," ere a boy has time by crouching to elude or supplicate, savage as it is, is yet more insulting, and sends to the core of the heart the shame of slavery, that can be extinguished but by undying hatred and deadly revenge. We wonder there are no murders. But what if the kicked be-a girl! We do not mean a little girl, eight or ten years' old, for that is not the precise kind of brutality we are thinking of in a kicking to such a one as she; the worst of a kick in her case is, that it may kill her on the spot, or make her a cripple for life. We mean a girl who, approaching to puberty, and in those heated regions they too soon reach it, has something of the pride of sex, perhaps of beauty; and in presence of her sweetheart, she herself being chaste and not immodest, and many such there are even in Factories, feels her whole being degraded beneath that of a brute-beast, in her person suddenly assailed by

such shameful outrage from the hoof of a fiend grinning the while like a satyr. Mr Sadler-exhibiting some black, heavy, leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House-exclaimed, "Sir, I should wish to propose an additional clause in this bill, enacting, that the overseer who dares to lay the lash on the almost naked body of the child, shall be sentenced to the tread-mill for a month; and it would be right if the master, who knowingly tolerates the infliction of this cruelty on abused infancy, this insult on parental feeling, this disgrace on the national character, should bear him company, though he roll to the house of correction in his chariot." A month in the tread-mill! Why, many a dishonest fellow gets that and more for but picking a bumpkin's fob. of his watch, or the pocket of his greatcoat of a purse at the door of the theatre. The man who kicks a girl must not be suffered to pollute the steps of a tread-mill, or to violate the feelings of vagrants. He must be flogged privately and publicly, his raw back denied plaster, his head shaved, and his carcass clothed in some ingeniously ignominious dress, of a substance suited to be spit upon, and a board adjusted to his posteriors, that his life may not be sacrificed by the continual kicking legalized by the legislative wisdom of the State, nor yet the feet of its inflictors soiled by contact with the "shameful parts of his constitution."

If there be truth in the account we have thus far given of the Factory System, what must be the Moralitywe mean the immorality of the boys and girls! Mr Drake, a worthy manufacturer, says, " As far as I have observed with regard to morals in the Mills, there is every thing about them that is disgusting to every one conscious of correct morality. Their language is very indecent; and both sexes take great liberties with each other in the Mills, without being at all ashamed of their conduct." Another witness says, "They are immoral in all their conduct. Going to the Factories is like going to a school, but it is to learn every thing that is bad." Mr Benjamin Bradshaw, a witness of great intelligence,

and a pious man, a preacher among the Methodists, says, "They are, generally speaking, ignorant and wicked, proverbially so; to hear them in the Factory, and see their conduct, would move any body with commiseration that had any thing like a feeling of concern for the morals of his fellow-creatures; they are, in general, bad to an extreme."-But here the details are far more painful than of the cases of cruelty, and some of them truly horrible. Many Factories are the worst of brothels. Yet has MacCulloch many times publicly avowed his belief, that females so employed are more virtuous than those who lead a rural life! He, and others like him, shutting their leaden eyes on all other facts familiarly known to all the rest of the world, or stupidly staring at them with dogged determination to misrepresent all they see, have founded their misbelief on the comparative number of illegitimate children. The simplest persons examined before the Committee know too well the cause of that effect. True it is, that "that effect defective comes by cause.' "I have yet to learn," says one witness of a different stamp," that the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes is favourable to an increase of population."-Fathers wept before the Committee, thinking of their own daughters. The contagion of vice in the heated and huddled Factory is dreadful, and the disease is rank among very childhood. There is no need to argue about the matter; to educe and deduce-like a blockhead to prove it so-or so; or like a dunce to proceed from premises to conclusions, which, like a dray-horse, he draws. There is the vice-the guilt -the sin-acting before our very eyes. And it must be shuddered at in its enormity, that in our horror we may be driven on to discover and to apply a cure. Better in excitement to exaggerate, than in indifference to extenuate moral evil. Our error in judgment in the one case vehemently instigates us on the right path to the attainment of a noble end. the other, it holds us back from taking even a few steps, and in spite of all the misgivings that will touch our hearts, reconciles us to what our awakened conscience would condemn, were we to contemplate

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