The custom of sending children to work from the time they can earn sixpence a-week, renders education impossible.  In the evenings they are only fit to sleep:  on Sundays, in fine weather, the majority very naturally prefer walking in the fields to the dry task of acquiring knowledge, the value of which they are not sufficiently educated to appreciate.

The effect of the want of education and the habit of idle Mondays on the male population is sufficiently lamentable.  A man who can neither read nor write, in addition to the abstract pleasure Saxons have in drinking, finds an occupation and a substitute for ideas in a pot and pipe.  The effect on the female population is even more baneful.  They are so fully occupied that they have neither time to write, nor to cook, to read nor to sew, and they become wives and mothers with no better qualification for their important duties than girls educated in a fashionable school, without being able to obtain the assistance of servants and governesses.

Wives engaged in factories are obliged to leave their children to the care of strangers or elder children, themselves scarcely above the age of children.

One consequence is, that according to the report of a committee of physicians and surgeons in 1840:  “The ratio of infant mortality in Birmingham is very considerable, greatly exceeding that of the metropolis, and of the agricultural districts, though not as high as in some provincial towns.”  “Severe burns and scalds, particularly the former, are so numerous, that in the general hospital two rooms are devoted for their reception.”

We have not been able to obtain any precise statistics of education among the operative classes; but we find that among criminals upwards of ninety per cent. are either totally or very imperfectly educated, and that of 15,000 young persons between the age of ten and fifteen engaged in manufacture, not more than 1,000 have an opportunity of education, except from Sunday schools.

In Sunday schools the instruction is confined to reading the scriptures and religious books, except in the schools attached to the meeting-houses of the Society of Friends and the Unitarians, the conductors of which have had the good sense to accommodate their plans to the peculiar wants of a manufacturing district.

No general movement seems to have been attempted to correct this crying evil of infant employment and neglected education, none of the patriots, bearded or shaven, have ventured to exert their strong lungs in so unpopular a cause:  it is so much easier to stand on your own dunghill and abuse the lord of the manor than to put on an apron and a cap, mix up the lime and water, and whitewash your own cottage.  But several manufacturers have honourably distinguished themselves by beginning the work of reformation at home.

Mr. Gillet, the pen manufacturer, whose work is principally done by females, admits no girls into his shops under thirteen; he makes ability to read indispensable, and gives a preference in obtaining employment to those who can write; and requires a certificate of regular attendance from a Sunday school teacher.