countenance the most abject and idiotic-like a thing, a creeping thing, peculiar to the place. On approaching and speaking to him, he shrunk trembling and affrighted in a corner, as if I was about to do him some bodily injury, and from which neither coaxing nor temptations could draw him out."

The report goes on to say:

"The ages of the children (the trappers) vary from six and a half to ten years old; few come before they are nearly seven, and few remain longer than nine. It is a most painful thing to contemplate the dull dungeon-like life these creatures are doomed to spend ; a life for the most part, passed in solitude, damp, and darkness. They are allowed no light; but sometimes a good natured collier will bestow a little bit of candle on them as a treat. On one occasion, as I was passing a little trapper, he begged of me a little grease from my candle. I found that the poor child had scooped out a hole in a great stone, and having obtained a wick, had manufactured a rude sort of lamp—and that he kept it going as well as he could, by begging contributions of melted tallow from the candles of any passers by."

One child says:

'I've no time to play; I never see daylight all the week in winter, except when I look up the pitshaft, and then it looks about half a yard wide. Another aged seven, says:

'I stop twelve hours in the pit; I never see

daylight now except on Sundays; I fell asleep one day, and a corve ran over my leg and made it smart; they'd squeeze me against the door if I fall a sleep again.'

George Foster (12 years) has wrought a double shift of twenty-four hours three times in the Benton pit. About a year and a half ago he wrought three shifts at one time, going down at four o'clock one morning, and staying thirty-six hours without coming up. The overman asked him to stop, &c. A great quantity of boys are doing this now, from a scarcity of work. Some lads have worked double shifts, thirty-six hours lately. John Clough, aged fourteen, worked thirty-six hours last Friday, (his brother confirms this.")

*

But there is yet a darker side of this appalling picture. Girls as well as boys, infant girls and young women, are thus employed; and such are the degrading effects of habit, that when these girls grow up to puberty they continue to work in the mines without the slightest sense of their position, being other than is fitting a state of civilization. These females are not kept as trappers," or put to some other light occupation: they are harnessed to the "corves," and must draw their loads as well as the men!

"Girls, says Mr. Scriven, from five to eighteen, perform the work of boys. There is no distinction whatever in their coming up the shaft or going down-in the mode of hurrying or thrust

ing in the weights or corves, or in the distances they are hurried-in wages or dress."

"A broad belt is buckled round their waist, to the front of which a chain is fastened, which, when they go down on all fours, is passed between their legs and attached to the corve, which they draw after them, thus harnessed to it like animals."

An Irish writer, with the enthusiasm of his nation, says of this treatment of females:

"Thank Heaven we have not been assimilated in all things! and from lands-end to lands-end throughout Ireland the bare mention of placing a woman 'all fours,' and harnessing her to a cart, would be met with a shout of indignation that would make civilized England blush. The evidence of one woman is so strikingly illustrative of the immoral tendency of the practice of having women employed at such labour, that we quote it, even at the risk of being thought to dwell too long upon a subject so abhorrent to all the higher feelings of our nature. Says this female witness examined :-'I wear a belt and chain at the workings to get the corves out. The getters are naked, except their caps; they pull off all their clothes. I see them at work when I go up. They sometimes beat me, if I am not quick enough. There are twenty boys and fifteen men. All are naked.'

But horrible as is the condition of these children, there is another class whose fate is infinitely worse the orphans, children of paupers, who are apprenticed as "hurriers" by the parish officers

to the conductors of the mines. Of this barbarous custom, the London Morning Herald remarks: "The usual plan is to bind them to this worse than negro slavery in its worst days, from the age of nine years to twenty-one, but even this merciful limitation of the bondage is evaded without scruple. Mr. Symons, sub-commissioner, mentions a 'very gross case' of the Dewsbury union apprenticing a child who was not five years of age, and having been remonstrated with, pleaded that they had not formally bound him, and should not until he was nine! At Halifax a great number of children are apprenticed by the boards of guardians as hurriers, from the age of eight years to twenty-one,' getting rid of the children by payment of a sovereign; and at Oldham they have bound more parish children apprentices to miners latterly than to any other trade.""

The savage barbarity that rules the workhouse system in England, is strikingly developed here. It cannot be that the authorities which consign these tender orphans to such cruel slavery, are ignorant of their fate; they must know, when they send these "little ones, cast on the cold heath of the world's charity" to the coal caverns,-what they are doing! And I ask, where is the humanity of a social system which, rather than give food and clothing to infant children, whose parents are dead, will deliberately send them to these living graves, where they are certain to be treated with barbarity; to be tortured out of the world, or

grow up through the gloom of suffering to become heathens in a land which has established religion by law, at an expense of $50,000,000 a year, “in order that the entire population, and especially the poor, may be supplied with the bread of life."

The report contains more than enough evidence, that unheard of cruelties are inflicted on these orphans. An overseer in one of the mines candidly acknowledges, that "cases of cruelty to them were very common." He was obliged to summon three cases in one week, where boys had been unmercifully used, in one of which a child was nearly beaten to death. For some trivial fault, the following outrage was inflicted:"A man got the boy's head between his legs, and each boy in the pit, and there were eighteen or twenty of them, inflicted twelve strokes on the boy's rump and loins with a cat. I never saw such a sight in my life. The flesh of the rump and the loins were beaten to a jelly. The surgeon said the boy could not survive-but he did."

Is it not more mysterious than all, that these little creatures, all common sufferers, should unite in torturing each other? Naturalists say, that even wild beasts of the forest are often known to fight in each other's defence. But the report clears up the mystery, by stating that "had the other boys refused to take part in the brutality, they would have been served in the same way; and so far from the case being an extraordinary one, it was quite a common one." "No care whatever,”