faces, trying to go;
    And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
      The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
    For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
      Through the coal-dark underground—­
    Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
      In the factories, round and round.”

In the country the state of affairs was no better.  New systems of industrial production threw large numbers of farm hands out of work, the rate of wages fell, and machinery, steam, and the work of women and children took the place of the labourer.

The children found a champion in Lord Ashley, afterward Lord Shaftesbury, who succeeded in the face of much opposition in his efforts to pass laws which should do away with such shameful wrong and injustice.

The increased amount of coal used (15-1/2 million tons at the beginning of the century, 64-1/2 million tons in 1854) naturally led to the demand for more workers, and it was owing to this that the proposals of Lord Shaftesbury met with such opposition from the mine-owners, who feared that if child labour were made illegal they would not have sufficient ‘hands’ to work the mines and that they would have to pay higher wages.

The Act of 1842 forbade altogether the employment of women and girls in the mines, and allowed only boys of the age of ten or more to do such work.  The Poor Law Guardians of the time used to send children into the mines at the age of seven as a means of finding employment for them.  The hours of work were limited to ten daily and fifty-eight each week.

Little or no attempt was made in the Bill to give children the means of obtaining a good education, although considerably more than half the children in the country never went to school at all, and many large towns were without a proper school.

By a previous Factory Act of 1834 all children under fourteen years of age were compelled to attend school for two hours daily.  The employer was allowed to deduct one penny a week from the child’s wages to pay the teacher.  This proved absolutely useless, as the masters employed worn-out workers as teachers, and in consequence the children learnt nothing at all.

It was not until the year 1870 that a Bill was passed in Parliament to create an adequate number of public elementary schools for every district in the kingdom.  To show the increase in the number of schools built, there were in the year 1854, 3825, and in the year 1885, 21,976.

But the children of England owe almost as much to Charles Dickens as they do to Lord Shaftesbury.  He was almost the first, and certainly the greatest, writer who, with a heart overflowing with sympathy for little children, has left us in his books a gallery of portraits which no one can ever forget.

He himself, “a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy,” passed through a time of bitter poverty, and his stay at school, short as it was, was not a period of his life upon which he looked back with any pleasure.