laid in a stock of health and strength to sustain the labours of maturer years.  Where is the spinning-wheel now, and every simple and insulated occupation of the industrious cottager?  Wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are death-doomed from their cradles.  Look for one moment at midnight into a cotton-mill, amidst the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and complicated motions of diabolical mechanism:  contemplate the little human machines that keep play with the revolutions of the iron work, robbed at that hour of their natural rest, as of air and exercise by day:  observe their pale and ghastly features, more ghastly in that baleful and malignant light, and tell me if you do not fancy yourself on the threshold of Virgil’s hell, where

Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo, Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos, Abstulit atra dies, et FUNERE MERSIT ACERBO!

As Mr Escot said this, a little rosy-cheeked girl, with a basket of heath on her head, came tripping down the side of one of the rocks on the left.  The force of contrast struck even on the phlegmatic spirit of Mr Jenkison, and he almost inclined for a moment to the doctrine of deterioration.  Mr Escot continued: 

Mr Escot. Nor is the lot of the parents more enviable.  Sedentary victims of unhealthy toil, they have neither the corporeal energy of the savage, nor the mental acquisitions of the civilised man.  Mind, indeed, they have none, and scarcely animal life.  They are mere automata, component parts of the enormous machines which administer to the pampered appetites of the few, who consider themselves the most valuable portion of a state, because they consume in indolence the fruits of the earth, and contribute nothing to the benefit of the community.

Mr Jenkison. That these are evils cannot be denied; but they have their counterbalancing advantages.  That a man should pass the day in a furnace and the night in a cellar, is bad for the individual, but good for others who enjoy the benefit of his labour.

Mr Escot. By what right do they so?

Mr Jenkison. By the right of all property and all possession:  le droit du plus fort.

Mr Escot. Do you justify that principle?

Mr Jenkison. I neither justify nor condemn it.  It is practically recognised in all societies; and, though it is certainly the source of enormous evil, I conceive it is also the source of abundant good, or it would not have so many supporters.

Mr Escot. That is by no means a consequence.  Do we not every day see men supporting the most enormous evils, which they know to be so with respect to others, and which in reality are so with respect to themselves, though an erroneous view of their own miserable self-interest induces them to think otherwise?