“They usually begin their work with the fourteenth year, and, if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the twentieth year.  Then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear.  They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in which they work.  Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their features express anxiety, they complain of pressure upon the chest.  Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube.  From time to time they expectorate considerable quantities of dust, either mixed with phlegm or in balls or cylindrical masses, with a thin coating of mucus.  Spitting blood, inability to lie down, night sweat, colliquative diarrhoea, unusual loss of flesh, and all the usual symptoms of consumption of the lungs finally carry them off, after they have lingered months, or even years, unfit to support themselves or those dependent upon them.  I must add that all attempts which have hitherto been made to prevent grinders’ asthma, or to cure it, have wholly failed.”

All this Knight wrote ten years ago; since then the number of grinders and the violence of the disease have increased, though attempts have been made to prevent it by covered grindstones and carrying off the dust by artificial draught.  These methods have been at least partially successful, but the grinders do not desire their adoption, and have even destroyed the contrivance here and there, in the belief that more workers may be attracted to the business and wages thus reduced; they are for a short life and a merry one.  Dr. Knight has often told grinders who came to him with the first symptoms of asthma that a return to grinding means certain death, but with no avail.  He who is once a grinder falls into despair, as though he had sold himself to the devil.  Education in Sheffield is upon a very low plane; a clergyman, who had occupied himself largely with the statistics of education, was of the opinion that of 16,500 children of the working-class who are in a position to attend school, scarcely 6,500 can read.  This comes of the fact that the children are taken from school in the seventh, and, at the very latest, in the twelfth year, and that the teachers are good for nothing; one was a convicted thief who found no other way of supporting himself after being released from jail than teaching school!  Immorality among young people seems to be more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else.  It is hard to tell which town ought to have the prize, and in reading the report one believes of each one that this certainly deserves it!  The younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit