the quiet of home life, and the comfort of the family to which these children and young people belong, is wholly sacrificed to this most unnatural state of things.”

Another branch of lace-making, bobbin-lacework, is carried on in the agricultural shires of Northampton, Oxford, and Bedford, chiefly by children and young persons, who complain universally of bad food, and rarely taste meat.  The employment itself is most unwholesome.  The children work in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, sitting always bent over the lace cushion.  To support the body in this wearying position, the girls wear stays with a wooden busk, which, at the tender age of most of them, when the bones are still very soft, wholly displace the ribs, and make narrow chests universal.  They usually die of consumption after suffering the severest forms of digestive disorders, brought on by sedentary work in a bad atmosphere.  They are almost wholly without education, least of all do they receive moral training.  They love finery, and in consequence of these two influences their moral condition is most deplorable, and prostitution almost epidemic among them. {193}

This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly!  Only a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers’ daughters, a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its equally “vile” children and children’s children.  But what does that come to?  Nothing, nothing whatsoever!  Our English bourgeoisie will lay the report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives and daughters will deck themselves with lace as before.  It is a beautiful thing, the composure of an English bourgeois.

A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland.  In no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers.  The application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much more than was the case in the production of the fabrics.  One man, with the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of printed cloth per minute.  The calico printers are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced (according to a petition of the printers to the House of Commons), in the year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton goods:  of these, 100,000 were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in part with machinery