case is related of a Scotch manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years old runaway, forced him to return running after the employer as fast as the master’s horse trotted, and beat him the whole way with a long whip. {151} In the large towns where the operatives resisted more vigorously, such things naturally happened less often.  But even this long working-day failed to satisfy the greed of the capitalists.  Their aim was to make the capital invested in the building and machinery produce the highest return, by every available means, to make it work as actively as possible.  Hence the manufacturers introduced the shameful system of night-work.  Some of them employed two sets of operatives, each numerous enough to fill the whole mill, and let one set work the twelve hours of the day, and the other twelve hours of the night.  It is needless to picture the effect upon the frames of young children, and even upon the health of young persons and adults, produced by permanent loss of sleep at night, which cannot be made good by any amount of sleep during the day.  Irritation of the whole nervous system, with general lassitude and enfeeblement of the entire frame, were the inevitable results, with the fostering of temptation to drunkenness and unbridled sexual indulgence.  One manufacturer testifies {152a} that during the two years in which night-work was carried on in his factory, the number of illegitimate children born was doubled, and such general demoralisation prevailed that he was obliged to give up night-work.  Other manufacturers were yet more barbarous, requiring many hands to work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times a week, letting them get a couple of hours sleep only, because the night-shift was not complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives only.

The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything that is known to me in this line.  Such infamies, as are here related, are nowhere else to be found—­yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own favour.  The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough.  The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours.  This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of Leeds:  {152b}

“I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones before I came to Leeds.  At first I thought it was rachitis, but I was soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of patients who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances of the disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year) in which children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by the circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began to work