t minds united to the strongest bodies, in the
circumstances to which the working classes, under such a system, are
speedily reduced. If any one doubts this, let him dig, or hoe, or walk
along the road, or trundle a hoop, or bear a fowling-piece for twelve
hours a-day without intermission, save at breakfast and dinner, and then
see with what appetite he can take to moral or intellectual improvement
when he comes in at night.

It is the deplorable effect of such a state of things, that it tends not
merely to perpetuate, but increase, the very evils from which it has
arisen, and reduce the working classes to that state, wherein extrication
from them is next to impossible. Under the pressure of the ceaseless
desire to cheapen production and diminish the cost of manufacture, young
persons of both sexes are huddled together into mills and factories, at so
early a period of life that they are scarcely fit to leave the nursery. It
has recently been found necessary to introduce a special statute to
prohibit children being employed in print-fields in England under _eight_
years of age. They are so because they can at once earn sixpence or
eightpence a-day by standing beside a wheel, or watching a film of cotton
which is discharged out of a machine; and this cheap and infantine labour
is equally attractive to the parents, who thus discover in their offspring
a source of income instead of a burden--and the manufacturer, who finds
his work done by little docile labourers, too weak to engage in a strike,
and yet strong enough to do the work. No exertion of strength is required,
at least none at any one moment, in many of these occupations--though the
work, when long continued, is to the last degree exhausting; the
steam-engine lifts all the weights and furnishes all the power. Thus there
is, from the necessities and interests of all concerned, a constant demand
for juvenile labour; and this demand speedily produces its own supply, by
promoting early marriages, or fostering a swarm of bastards among persons
thus thrown together, at the period of life when the passions are the
strongest, with a total separation at all times, save bed-time, from that
only school of virtue, the parental home.

Moral and intellectual cultivation is, God be praised, not rendered
impossible in the more superior and industrious of the manufacturing
operatives; but it may be doubted whether the species of literature which
is in general presented to them, and