avarice which arraigns the memory of a generation content so infamously to enrich itself. Those reports make clear that some part, at all events, of modern English prosperity results from the toil of children (among them babies of five and six), whose lives were spent in the black depths of coal pits and amid the hot roar of machinery. Poetry has found inspiration in the subject, but no verse can make such appeal to heart and conscience as the businesslike statements of a Commission. Lord Ashley's contemporaries in Parliament dismissed these stories with a smile. Employers of infant labour naturally would lend no ear to a sentimental dreamer; but it might have been presumed that at all events in one direction, that of the church, voices would make themselves heard in defence of "these little ones." We read, however, in the philanthropist's Diary: "In very few instances did any mill-owner appear on the platform with me; in still fewer the representatives of any religious denomination." This quiet remark serves to remind one, among other things, that Dickens was not without his reasons for a spirit of distrust towards religion by law established, as well as towards sundry other forms of religion—the spirit which, especially in his early career, was often misunderstood as
