y recognized the fact. In 1830 a Cardiff 'Society for
the improvement of the working population in the county of Glamorgan'
issued improving pamphlets:

No. 9. Population, or Patty's Marriage.

No. 10. The Poor's Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.

No. 11. Foreign Trade, or the Wedding Gown.[50]

But the northern miners were perverse people. In Scotland, according to
one Wesleyan minister,[51] the miners read Adam Smith. In
Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato. 'A
translation of Plato's _Ideal Republic_ is much read among those
classes, principally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure
ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his
principles and that Aristotle showed their fallacy.'[52]

3. The Royal Commission of 1842 on the Employment and Condition of
Children and Young Persons in Mines disclosed facts which made Cobdenite
England gasp. The worst evidence came from Lancashire, Cheshire, the
West Riding of Yorkshire, East Scotland, and South Wales. In these
districts juvenile labour was cheap and plentiful; and this was an
irresistible argument for its employment, though the miners themselves
disliked it. The meddlesome restrictions on the factories were a
contributory cause. Parents, it was said in Lancashire, were pushing
their children into colliery employment at an earlier age because of the
legal restrictions upon sending them to the neighbouring factories.

A Lancashire woman said in evidence:

'I have a belt round my waist and a chain passing between my
legs, and I go on my hands and feet.... The pit is very wet where
I work and the water comes over our clog tops always, and I have
seen it up to my thighs.... I have drawn till I have had the skin
off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family
way.'[53]

The children's office was a lonesome one. Children hate the dark, but
being little they fitted into a niche, and so they were used to open and
close the trap-doors. A trapper lad from the county of Monmouth, William
Richards, aged seven-and-a-half, said in evidence:

'I been down about three years. When I first went down, I could
not keep my eyes open; I don't fall asleep now; I smokes my pipe,
smokes half a quartern a week.'[54]

Except in the northern mining districts, where there were good day and
Sunday schools and Methodism was powerful, a pagan darkness prevailed.
As a De