meal and water for breakfast, flour and
water, with a little skimmed milk for dinner, oatmeal and water
again for a second supply.' He actually saw children in the
markets grubbing for the rubbish of roots. And yet, 'all the
places and persons I visited were scrupulously clean. Children
were in rags, but they were not in filth. In no single instance
was I asked for relief.... I never before saw poverty which
inspired respect, and misery which demanded involuntary homage.'

From Colne we journey to Accrington. Of its 9,000 inhabitants not more
than 100 were fully employed. Numbers kept themselves alive by
collecting nettles and boiling them. Some were entirely without food
every alternate day, and many had but one meal in the day and that a
poor one.[39]

Our last stage is Burnley, where the weavers--to quote again from Dr.
Cook Taylor--'were haggard with famine, their eyes rolling with that
fierce and uneasy expression common to maniacs. "We do not want
charity," they said, "but employment." I found them all Chartists, but
with this difference, that the block-printers and hand-loom weavers
united to their Chartism a hatred of machinery which was far from being
shared by the factory operatives.'

What a comment on England's industrial supremacy--England with her
virtual monopoly of large-scale manufacture in Europe! It must have been
a puzzle, too, for the Poor Law Commissioners, who were then building
workhouses in these parts for the purpose of depauperizing hand-loom
weavers on the less eligibility principle.

But how was it, with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not
die of starvation by the thousand? If we enter a cotton mill we shall
see why. Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by
sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much
as their parents, who were too old and too respectable to become factory
hands.

By this time, perhaps, it is evening, but this matters nothing to the
'melancholy mad engines', which feed on water or burning coals. The
young people will still be there, with eight hours work to their credit
and more to do--'kept to work by being spoken to or by a little
chastisement'.[40]

'I have seen them fall asleep,' said an over-looker in 1833, 'and they
have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep,
after the Billy had stopped. Put to bed with supper in their hands, they
were clas