to indulge in church-going or alcohol. They have no
clothes to go to church in. Their publican is the druggist, where they
buy opium for themselves and Godfrey's cordial, a preparation from
laudanum, for their children. In the whole of Leicester, with its
population of 50,000, there are but nine gin-houses. And only on Sundays
do they get a bit of schooling. 'We have only one bit of a cover lid to
cover the five of us in winter ... we are all obliged to sleep in one
bed.'[42]

A frame smith, making his usual inspection of hosiers' frames at
workmen's dwellings in Nottingham, after thus spending a fortnight,
found his health had begun to suffer from the squalid wretchedness of
their abodes. Thinking to improve it, he went on the same errand into
the country, but found the frame-work knitters there in a still more
deplorable state. From the bad air and other distressing influences in
their condition and that of their dwellings, in another fortnight he
returned, too ill to attend to his business for some weeks afterwards.
This occurred in 1843.[43]

Nottingham, however, with its up-to-date lace trade was usually better
off than this. The lace factories, like the cotton mills in Lancashire,
eased the position of the hand-workers. In Leicestershire the knitters
had no such alternative. The more their earnings were reduced, the more
helplessly they were bound to their only trade.

6. 1842 is a long while ago! Let us go to sleep for thirty years and
wake up in 1871, when the Truck Commissioners are publishing their
report.

West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square
miles. Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we
can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.

On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing
a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger,
a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master.
The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second
house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks
away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday
morning, waiting for his metal.) On Saturday the nailer comes back with
his nails, enters the fogger's shop, and emerges with 12_s._ in his
hand. But he does not go home. He slips into a shop close by and parts
company with the shillings. In return he gets a parcel, the cont