As to the education and morals of the mining population, they are, according to the Children’s Employment Commission, pretty good in Cornwall, and excellent in Alston Moor; in the coal districts, in general, they are, on the contrary, reported as on an excessively low plane.  The workers live in the country in neglected regions, and if they do their weary work, no human being outside the police force troubles himself about them.  Hence, and from the tender age at which children are put to work, it follows that their mental education is wholly neglected.  The day schools are not within their reach, the evening and Sunday schools mere shams, the teachers worthless.  Hence, few can read and still fewer write.  The only point upon which their eyes are as yet open is the fact that their wages are far too low for their hateful and dangerous work.  To church they go seldom or never; all the clergy complain of their irreligion as beyond comparison.  As a matter of fact, their ignorance of religious and of secular things, alike, is such that the ignorance of the factory operatives, shown in numerous examples in the foregoing pages, is trifling in comparison with it.  The categories of religion are known to them only from the terms of their oaths.  Their morality is destroyed by their work itself.  That the overwork of all miners must engender drunkenness is self-evident.  As to their sexual relations, men, women, and children work in the mines, in many cases, wholly naked, and in most cases, nearly so, by reason of the prevailing heat, and the consequences in the dark, lonely mines may be imagined.  The number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground; but proves too, that the illegitimate intercourse of the sexes has not here, as in the great cities, sunk to the level of prostitution.  The labour of women entails the same consequences as in the factories, dissolves the family, and makes the mother totally incapable of household work.

When the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report was laid before Parliament, Lord Ashley hastened to bring in a bill wholly forbidding the work of women in the mines, and greatly limiting that of children.  The bill was adopted, but has remained a dead letter in most districts, because no mine inspectors were appointed to watch over its being carried into effect.  The evasion of the law is very easy in the country districts in which the mines are situated; and no one need be surprised that the Miners’ Union laid before the Home Secretary an official notice, last year, that in the Duke of Hamilton’s coal mines in Scotland, more than sixty women were at work; or that the Manchester Guardian reported that a girl perished in an explosion in a mine near Wigan, and no one troubled himself further about the fact that an infringement of the law was thus revealed.  In single cases the employment of women may have been discontinued, but in general the old state of things remains as before.