are seized by it.  The profit-greed of mine owners which prevents the use of ventilators is therefore responsible for the fact that this working-men’s disease exists at all.  Rheumatism, too, is, with the exception of the Warwick and Leicestershire workers, a universal disease of the coal miners, and arises especially from the frequently damp working-places.  The consequence of all these diseases is that, in all districts without exception, the coal miners age early and become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year, though this is different in different places.  A coal miner who can follow his calling after the 45th or 50th year is a very great rarity indeed.  It is universally recognised that such workers enter upon old age at forty.  This applies to those who loosen the coal from the bed; the loaders, who have constantly to lift heavy blocks of coal into the tubs, age with the twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so that it is proverbial in the coal mining districts that the loaders are old before they are young.  That this premature old age is followed by the early death of the colliers is a matter of course, and a man who reaches sixty is a great exception among them.  Even in South Staffordshire, where the mines are comparatively wholesome, few men reach their fifty-first year.  Along with this early superannuation of the workers we naturally find, just as in the case of the mills, frequent lack of employment of the elder men, who are often supported by very young children.  If we sum up briefly the results of the work in coal mines, we find, as Dr. Southwood Smith, one of the commissioners, does, that through prolonged childhood on the one hand and premature age on the other, that period of life in which the human being is in full possession of his powers, the period of manhood, is greatly shortened, while the length of life in general is below the average.  This, too, on the debit side of the bourgeoisie’s reckoning!

All this deals only with the average of the English coal mines.  But there are many in which the state of things is much worse, those, namely, in which thin seams of coal are worked.  The coal would be too expensive if a part of the adjacent sand and clay were removed; so the mine owners permit only the seams to be worked; whereby the passages which elsewhere are four or five feet high and more are here kept so low that to stand upright in them is not to be thought of.  The working-man lies on his side and loosens the coal with his pick; resting upon his elbow as a pivot, whence follow inflammations of the joint, and in cases where he is forced to kneel, of the knee also.  The women and children who have to transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while a man behind pushes with hands and head.  The pushing with the head engenders local irritations, painful swellings, and ulcers.  In many cases, too, the shafts are wet, so that these workers have to crawl through dirty or salt water several inches deep, being thus exposed to a special irritation of the skin.  It can be readily imagined how greatly the diseases already peculiar to the miners are fostered by this especially frightful, slavish toil.