ignorant as savages and little better than heathens, by a class of intelligent and disciplined young people, well grown in body and mind by means of the joint exercises of school and labour: but the great work is about to begin. Meantime, here is a remarkable contrast between the young life of the parish-school and that of the Staffordshire Potteries.
Low as is the depth in which these unhappy children are sunk, there is yet a lower deep. The young Lucifer-match makers are, we are told, “the lowest of the low.” No respectable parent who could help it, would, it is declared, allow his child to be a mould-runner in the pottery business: but these lucifer-match makers are under such a doom that they are usually children without any guardians at all,—roamers out of the streets, outcasts from Ragged Schools whence they have wandered. Employments fatal to health and life are always filled by the disreputable; and the more dangerous the more disreputable. The horrors of this case are so desperate that it is a comfort to know that the number of young workers is under seventeen hundred. I will not grieve my readers by a repetition of the shocking story, which they have probably read once or oftener, of the jaw-disease under which the workers in phosphorus are tortured and maimed, when not killed. Our particular concern here is with the evil of such an employment of the children as cuts them off from all chance of redemption from their wild ignorance and lawlessness.
The boys and girls are too often crowded together in small rooms, where some are mixing the ingredients which give out the deadly fumes that all are thus compelled to breathe. No child should be made, or allowed, to stand for half-an-hour leaning over a reeking poisonous mixture: yet not only is this always going on in the small establishments, but the children are kept in that fatal atmosphere, or not driven out of it, till they stop work at night. If they bring their dinners, they sit down in the midst of the fumes to eat; and they make no attempt to rid themselves of what clings about them, by any method of cleansing. They are equally insensible to the fate of their minds. They know nothing of any ideas beyond those of their mechanical employment: they have no time for education, and no wishes about it; and, for the most part, nobody to desire it for them. Such is the life of the smaller establishments.
But the business is rising into a higher order of management. A better class of employers has gone into it; and one consequence is that the children are distributed through many apartments, amidst abundance of fresh air; that they change their employment frequently, and are made to purify themselves after work, and to go out to their meals. Not only do the masters desire to abolish the evil of “overtime,” but some of them actually petition for an extension of the Factory Act to their business. They have witnessed its operation in other employments, and they see that the children who spend three hours a day at school become better worth having than others. In the long run there is nothing lost in the way of wages, but the contrary: this reconciles the parents and other workpeople; and the employers find their advantage in the raised character of the class, and in the way in which the Act keeps selfish and tyrannical workmen in order. Therefore do the leading lucifer-match makers desire to be under the Act. They will put up with some inconvenience as to hours, &c., in order to send the children to school. If it is once declared that the children must go to school, “the thing can be done somehow,” says one of them. Another says, “They have every right to go to school. I should only have to get a few more children: that would be all. And those who went to school would work better, and be more orderly, and more honest.” Thus there seems to be reason to hope that these sixteen hundred children, “the poorest of the poor, and lowest of the low,” will soon be trying the experiment of getting an education without giving up work and wages.
The young Paper-stainers are sufferers beyond all the rest from long hours of work. There are eleven hundred of them; and they are, for the most part, at the mercy of the men they work with, who really seem to have no mercy on them. During the summer they are not usually overworked; but from October to April (inclusive), they are at it from six in the morning till nine or ten at night, for days or weeks together. The idea of their going to school never occurs to anybody about them; for they cannot even get their meals regularly. They snatch their food at intervals, when they can. Out of a score of them, half-a-dozen or more are missing: they are so worn out that they cannot come to work. Others are dropping, overcome with sleep; and the men have to shout to them to get an answer, or attention to what they are about. Some cry because their limbs ache so, or their feet are so sore from long standing. For my part, I do not promise that I should never cry myself under such fatigue: but we must remember that six or seven hundred of these poor creatures are under thirteen, and some few even under eight. One boy of seven worked sixteen hours; and his father kneeled down by the machine to feed the child as he worked, “for he could not leave it or stop.” This father carried his boy home on his back, “through the snow;” as he well might if the poor little fellow had been for sixteen hours in a room heated to above 100°. Such children get no education at all, as the parents explain, because they cannot wake up on Sundays to go to school. “They lie abed all day, to rest.”
Some fathers, as well as masters, are displeased at the mention of a change which might result in “all under the age of thirteen being got rid of;” but others hail the prospect of the comprehension of the paper-staining business under the Factory Act. If the youngsters could be taught in school up to thirteen, one father thinks, they would do very well afterwards, and manage to improve at home. Another exclaims, “Half-time and education would be a grand thing!” Another answers for a great deal: “We should all like to be under the Factory Act.” What would the little boy of nine say who, having entered at seven, worked through an entire winter from six in the morning to nine or ten at night, in excessive heat, and