the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the Sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and write their names with difficulty.  The prevailing morals correspond with these means of education.  In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne asserts, and supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no moral sense among the workers.  In general, he found that the children neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for them.  They were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat, and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards.  They knew nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil from morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired. {202}

In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers also.  On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health.  Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache, biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia.  By far the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks, which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early death.  The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled.  The dry grinders’ average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders’ rarely exceeds forty-five.  Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says:  {203}

“I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent from their work.  There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.  About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age.  The razor grinders, who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years, and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the fortieth and fiftieth year.”

The same physician gives the following description of the course of the disease called grinders’ asthma: