and we find here {199} precisely the same features reappearing which the Factories’ Report presented,—­the work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc. etc.  The children are described as half-starved and ragged, the half of them are said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them get nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon a pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal—­there were actually cases in which children received no food from eight in the morning until seven at night.  Their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter.  Hence they are all small and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour.  And when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in Birmingham fit for military service.  “The working men,” says a recruiting surgeon, “are small, delicate, and of very slight physical power; many of them deformed, too, in the chest or spinal column.”  According to the assertion of a recruiting sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller than those anywhere else, being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall; out of 613 recruits, but 238 were found fit for service.  As to education, a series of depositions and specimens taken from the metal districts have already been given, {200a} to which the reader is referred.  It appears further, from the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, that in Birmingham more than half the children between five and fifteen years attend no school whatsoever, that those who do are constantly changing, so that it is impossible to give them any training of an enduring kind, and that they are all withdrawn from school very early and set to work.  The report makes it clear what sort of teachers are employed.  One teacher, in answer to the question whether she gave moral instruction, said, No, for threepence a week school fees that was too much to require, but that she took a great deal of trouble to instil good principles into the children. (And she made a decided slip in her English in saying it.) In the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder.  The moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable.  Half of all the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single year ninety ten-years’-old offenders, among them forty-four serious criminal cases, were sentenced.  Unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the opinion of the commissioner, almost universal, and that at a very early age. {200b}