night-work for the infants was usually part of the ordinary routine. It was found that a peculiarly stunted and debased race was thus in process of production on a wide scale, utterly uneducated, and not only immoral but with no conception of Christianity or morals. In calico-printing, the report found, children of five or six were usually kept at work fourteen hours consecutively in all the districts. In the Wolverhampton region there was a "general and almost incredible abuse" of the children. At Birmingham vice prevailed almost universally from a very early period of life, accompanied by child drunkenness on a wide scale. At Sheffield, too, there was a prevalence of the same evil. In the lace business of Nottingham it was customary for children to begin at five or six, and to be called up to work at all hours of the night with disastrous results. All this was exceeded by what went on in the millinery establishments of the metropolis. In Lancashire the parents were in the habit of "sacrificing their children without hesitation" for what they could earn. The Commissioners concluded that, over great portions of the country, the natural parental instinct was wholly extinguished by the pressure of industrialism, "the order of nature being reversed." Thus the children in the industrial regions of this country were being widely manufactured into the degenerate, the idiot, and the criminal.
The specific nature of the forces thus let loose against the child, and therefore against the future,
