We meant to say no more upon the subject of the strike of Lancashire
masters against Factory law, until we had seen the issue of a question
raised before one of the superior courts; but the publication, by the
National (or, as it should read, Lancashire) Association, of a pamphlet
written by Miss Martineau, which attacks our veracity, compels us to
speak, or to hazard misinterpretation of our silence. If no question
of public justice were involved, we should prefer misinterpretation to
the task of showing weakness in a sick lady whom we esteem. We have a
respect for Miss Martineau, won by many good works she has written and
many good deeds she has done, which nothing that she now can say or do
will destroy; and we most heartily claim for her the respect of our
readers as a thing not to be forfeited for a few hasty words, or for a
scrap or two of argument too readily adopted upon partial showing.
The pamphlet in question is an essay written, as we are told in an
introduction, for the Westminster Review, and declined on account
of its manner of treatment. When we say that a part of its manner
is to accuse this journal of “unscrupulous statements, insolence,
arrogance, and cant,” and that amidst much abuse of “Mr. Dickens or
his contributor”--“his partner in the disgrace,” another part of its
manner is to abuse Mr. Dickens personally for “conceit, insolence,
and wilful one-sidedness,” it will be seen that the editor of the
Review exercised the discretion of a gentleman. We regret very much
indeed that the National (or Lancashire) Association has been less
discreet, and, by issuing the paper as a pamphlet at its own expense,
has been less friendly to the lady than the lady wished to be to them.
We are reluctantly compelled to show, that both in tone and argument
Miss Martineau’s pamphlet, published by the Lancashire Association to
Prevent the Fencing of Machinery, is--we will not forget her claims
upon our forbearance, and we will say--a mistake.
And first, as to the tone. Using in her reply the manner pointed out by
us, Miss Martineau says, that certain articles in the eleventh volume
of this journal[A] put forward inaccurate statements, “in a temper and
by language which convey their own condemnation.” But, lest it should
be thought that what was wrong in us cannot be quite right in herself,
Miss Martineau adds, on the same page, “I like courtesy as well as
anybody can do; but when vicious legislation and social oppression
are upheld by men in high places, the vindication of principle, and
exposure of the mischief, must come before consideration of private
feeling.” Now, confessing for a moment our defect of temper, might we
not say, very fairly, that a writer who believes in his heart that
resistance to a given law dooms large numbers of men to mutilation, and
not few to horrible deaths, may honestly speak with some indignation
of the resistance by which those deaths are produced; and that the
same right to be angry is not equally possessed by an advocate who
argues that the deaths cannot be helped, and that nobody has a right
to meddle specially in any way with a mill-owner’s trade? But if any
dispassionate reader of the articles to which Miss Martineau refers
should pass from them to the personal invective with which they are
met, he will not fail to perceive that we attacked only what we held
to be an evil course of opposition to a necessary law, and abided
firmly by the leading features of the case, apart from any personal
consideration. We spoke plainly, as the case required, and with the
earnest feeling that the case called forth; but it will be found, on
reference, that in not one of these articles was an attack made upon
any person whomsoever; that the chairman of the National Association
was not named; that when cases of accident were necessarily cited,
it was enough for us to say “a certain mill,” because we spoke of
principles and not of persons. It will be found, also, that we took
pains to disconnect our plain speaking upon one shortcoming; from a
general disparagement of mill-owners; and that we went quite out of our
way to occupy no inconsiderable part of these papers with a cordial
reminder of the excellent enterprises and fine spirit that belonged to
chieftains of the cotton class. Miss Martineau says for herself, that
“in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no
compromise and no mistake.” We felt so too; but also felt that it would
be a great mistake and a great compromise of principle, to intrude
personalities on the discussion of it.
The history of the present pamphlet, given by its author in a letter to
the “Association of Factory Occupiers,” is, that wishing to controvert
the views of Mr. Horner, the Factory Inspector, she mentioned her
desire to obtain the facts on both sides of the question “to a member
of your Association, who visited me soon after;” and we cannot help
feeling, that for the facts on both sides, which are so clearly only
the statements on one side, and (we hope for her sake) for the temper
too, the writer is indebted to her faith in the opinions of her friend.
She thinks also, that the notes of a barrister who edited the Factory
Act show “that it was high time the passionate advocates of meddling
legislation should be met by opponents of such legislation who are, by
position, likely to be at once dispassionate and disinterested.” To
ensure this desirable result, a pamphlet written in a passion, is sent
to be published and circulated by the Association directly engaged in
maintaining one side of the matter, and composed of the persons most
distinctly interested in its issue.
Vexed at the blindness of the barrister-at-law, who is as blind as
ourselves, Miss Martineau goes on to say, in her prefatory letter,
“What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested
party, to write such a preface as Mr. Tapping’s, it is difficult to
imagine. On opening it, my eye falls at once on a false statement,
which ought to destroy all the authority of the rest.” What is
the “false statement” of Mr. Tapping? Mr. Tapping wrote that the
manufacturers have instituted the National Association of Factory
Occupiers, for the special purpose of raising a fund for defraying
thereout all fines for not fencing, which may be inflicted upon
members.... “This statement,” adds Miss Martineau, “is dated October
second, eighteen hundred and fifty-five; whereas the Special Report of
your Association, dated July, expressly declares that the Association
will pay no penalties awarded under Factory Acts.” Miss Martineau’s
difficulty would have vanished had she known the truth; which is
this:--It was announced distinctly, by the founders of the Association,
so long ago as the March previous, that they _would_ raise money to
pay penalties; and it was only when they were made conscious of the
danger of the ground so taken, that they forestalled the period of
an annual report, and printed the so-called Special Report, in which
they took pains to fence themselves off against legal accident. This
report was their own stroke of policy, printed for themselves, and to
be had only from their office. It was not advertised nor published;
it was sent to members--it was there to use. As soon as it came into
our hands, through a private source, we made our comments on it; but
the date of its being written, though it has July on the cover, is the
seventh of August. After it was written, it had to be printed, and it
could then only have been by some unlikely chance that any tidings of
it could have reached a barrister in London by the second of October.
The public reports of the proceedings connected with the formation of
the Association had informed him that there was a proposition to pay
penalties incurred by occupiers who refused to fence. There was no
other source of information open to him.
This point is of importance to us, and we for the second time place
it beyond question that, before the appearance of the Special Report,
the Association did combine to pay penalties, in obedience to the
recommendation of a body of mill-owners who had gone to London with the
hope of getting the Factory Act into discredit with the government.
The recommendation was read at the meeting[B] in these distinct
terms: “The deputation are of opinion, that a fund of not less than
five thousand pounds should be immediately raised; and they suggest
that all cases of prosecution which the committee of management are of
opinion can be legitimately dealt with by the Association, shall be
defended by, _and the penalties or damages paid out of, the funds of
the Association_.” Whereupon it was moved, seconded, and unanimously
resolved:
“That the recommendation in the report, to raise immediately a sum of
not less than £5,000 be immediately carried into execution, and that
an additional contribution of one shilling per nominal horse-power
from each mill-occupier (making a total of two shillings) be at once
called for, to enable the committee to carry out the recommendation
to defend, _at the cost of the Association_, all cases of prosecution
which they may consider fairly to come within the sphere of the
Association.”[C]
We have only to add, that the report including these resolutions,
besides receiving a wide notoriety through the newspapers, was printed
and circulated by the Association itself, and that a copy of it was
obtained by us before we wrote upon the subject. There can be no doubt,
then, under what impressions the first members of the Association
joined it, and of the accusation under which it justly lay until it
thought best publicly to withdraw from a dangerous position.
On this same point, Miss Martineau is of opinion that “Mr. Dickens had
better consider, for the sake of his own peace of mind, as well as
the good of his neighbours, how to qualify himself for his enterprise
before he takes up his next task of reform. If he must give the first
place to his idealism and sensibilities, let him confine himself to
fiction; and if he will put himself forward as a social reformer, let
him do the only honest thing,--study both sides of the question he
takes up. How far he is from having done this in the present case, a
short, but not unimportant statement may show. He says, by his own pen,
or his contributor’s [let us say, then, his contributor’s] ‘But the
factory inspectors will proceed for penalties? Certainly they will;
and then, if these gentlemen be members of the National Association
of Factory Occupiers, they will have their case defended for them
and their fine immediately paid.’ Yet while the writer declares his
information to be drawn from the papers of the Association, he ignores
the following conspicuous passages from their First Report”--the
retractation then being quoted.
Now, setting aside the likelihood or unlikelihood of Mr. Dickens, to
secure his peace of mind, taking ghostly advice from Miss Martineau,
there is no doubt that in the said First Report the retractation
was conspicuous, and that moreover, it was meant to be conspicuous;
but we can hardly think it so conspicuous as to have been visible,
not merely before it _was_ visible, but, as we firmly believe, even
before it was so much as conceived. On the same line with the page
605 of this journal, upon which we are lectured, are inscribed the
words “Household Words, July 28, 1855.” The number dated on that day
was, in the usual manner, published three days previously, and issued
in Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, but the report which we
failed to do the honest thing by citing was not written--as we find
by the date against the chairman’s signature--until the seventh of
August! When it reached us in September we at once (in our two hundred
and eighty-fifth number) made public its purport; but we did not say
what we may now say, namely, that there came with it a remark which
we believe to be true, and which dates certainly go far to justify:
that the Special Report--a thing not contemplated in the rules--was
actually suggested by our comments,--that our journal, containing a
wide publication of the illegal position of the recusant mill-owners,
having reached Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, was considered
by the committee of the Association to necessitate retreat to safer
ground by means of a Special Report, and that by the seventh of August,
the report was completed and signed; after which, it has been further
suggested to us, that July was put upon the cover, not without a hope
that somebody might be misled into believing that it had really been
produced several weeks sooner than it was. Be that as it may, we should
not have supposed that the Association, for the sake of passing a so
easily detected deception on the public, would have imperilled the
reputation of an honourable lady by leaving uncorrected in her pamphlet
a flagrant error, of which it could by no conceivable chance have been
ignorant, and by suffering it to go forth, headed in small capitals,
MIS-STATEMENTS IN HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
We turn with sorrow to the other contents of the pamphlet. As the
pamphlet of the Association we are bound to show why it can only damage
the cause of the Association with the government and with the public;
we would have wholly spared the writer our present exposure of her
mistake, if we could.
The pamphlet begins with some calm wise words about the war, by which
the reader is prepared to expect a very different treatment of the
immediate topic in hand than that which it is destined to receive.
No sooner is the subject touched than the false keynote is struck,
and of all persons in the world, it is Miss Martineau whom we find
echoing the exaggerated lamentations of an injured interest. “The
issue,” we are told, “to which the controversy is now brought, is
that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures, or the
existing factory law. The two cannot longer co-exist.” This is one
of those remarkable predictions of which we are beginning, by a very
long national experience, to understand the value. If the cry be not
ridiculous enough in the form just quoted, how does it look thus--for
we have it repeated afterwards in this more piquant way,--“It seems
to be agreed by the common sense of all concerned who have any common
sense, that our manufactures must cease, or the factory law, as
expounded by Mr. Horner must give way.” We believe it was Mr. Bounderby
who was always going to throw his property into the Atlantic, and we
have heard of Miss Martineau’s clients being indignant against Mr.
Bounderby as a caricature. And yet this looks very like him!
The pamphlet then adopts the precise tone of the mill-owners in
speaking of the accidents as chiefly “of so slight a nature that they
would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that
provided by the Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred are cases
of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger
or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the
spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the
act.” In the next place the yearly deaths by preventable accidents
from machinery, which number about forty, are reduced to eleven, by
excluding all machinery except the actual shafts, and throughout the
pamphlet afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is used--once in a
way that has astonished us, as it will certainly surprise our readers.
Even lower down on the same page the writer slips into the statement,
that there are only twelve deaths a-year by “mill-accidents from all
kinds of factory machinery.” We wish it were so; but in the last
report, published before we made our comments, there were twenty-one
slain in six months; one hundred and fifty had, in six months, lost
parts of their right hands; one hundred and thirty, parts of their left
hands; twenty-eight lost arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had bones
broken; a hundred had suffered fracture or serious damage to the head
and face.
In the report for the half-year next following, the deaths by machinery
in factories were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-one lost the right
hand, or, more generally, parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the
left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and twenty had bones broken.
Thirty-nine, therefore, was the number of deaths in the year last
reported (a fresh half-yearly report is at present due), and there
was no lack of accidents more serious than the “rubbing off a bit of
skin.” Of the factory accidents, we are also told, not five per cent.
are owing to machinery. If so, great indeed must be the number of the
whole! But it is solely of the accidents arising from machinery that
we from the first have spoken, since upon them only the law is founded
which we wish to see maintained.
So far as we can understand the figures of the pamphlet, they arise
from the ingenuity of some friend, who has eliminated from the rest
those accidents arising out of actual contact with a shaft, and then
put this part for the whole. But the law says, “That every fly-wheel
directly connected with the steam-engine or water-wheel, or other
mechanical power, whether in the engine-house or not, and every part
of a steam-engine and water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near to
which children or young persons are liable to pass or be employed,
and all parts of the mill-gearing in a factory shall be securely
fenced.” The whole controversy is about obedience to this law, and the
consequences of resistance to it. The most horrible and fatal accidents
are those connected most immediately with the shafts; the unfenced
shafts are the essential type of the whole question, and the fencing
of them implies necessarily the general consent to obey the law. For
this reason we have, no doubt, in common with other people, frequently
represented by such a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of
resistance to the law, without any suspicion of the ingenious turn that
might be given to the question on this ground, by an Association not
ashamed to employ sleight of hand in argument.
And now that we discuss the figures of the pamphlet, we turn to another
of the strange pages, headed Mis-statements in Household Words. We
make, it is said, the extraordinary statement, that these deadly
shafts “mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures;
and considering,” the writer adds, “the magnitude of this exaggeration
(our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts
is twelve per year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures
when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers
produce facts in answer to romance,” we proceed, it is said, “to beg
the question as usual; in this passage: ‘As for ourselves, we admit
freely, that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify,
by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised
or savage.’”
By that admission we abide--and by our figures we abide. This specimen
of our mis-statements, of our “begging the question as usual,” is a
yet more curious example of a question begged by the accusers, than
that other proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not having read a
document several weeks before it came into existence. We said, in the
passage above cited, that the deadly shafts “mangled or murdered” so
many persons a-year; that by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of
the law, two thousand persons were mutilated or killed. The writer of
the pamphlet has been led to beg wholly the addition of the mutilated
on our side, and to set against it, on her side, only the killed, and
not all those: only a selection from them of the persons _actually
killed on shafts_; advantage being taken of the use of the phrase,
deadly shafts, to represent machinery in unfenced mills. And that it
is really meant, in the writer’s own phrase to “ignore” the fact that
we counted the killed, is evident from a succeeding sentence. “If Mr.
Dickens, or his contributor, assigns his number of two thousand a-year,
his opponents may surely cite theirs--of three-and-a-half per cent. or
twelve in a-year.” Our number, certainly, was wrong; but it erred only
by under-statement. We might have said nearly four thousand, without
falsehood. The number of deaths and mutilations together arising from
machinery in factories, has been two thousand, not in a year, but half
a year. Because we did not wish to urge the slight cuts, and the few
scarcely avoidable mishaps which did not belong fairly to the case as
we were stating it, we struck off some two thousand from the number
that we might have given.
Our readers may now form some estimate of the strange weakness and
unreasonableness of the pamphlet, issued by the Factory Association
to refute us. There is not one strong point in it that affects the
question; there is only one that seems strong, and to that the writer
had in her own hands a most conclusive answer. Mr. Fairbairn, in
December 1853, reported against the practicability or safety of fencing
horizontal shafts. The answer to this is repeatedly contained in the
Inspector’s reports for the half-year ending on the thirtieth of April
last, cited at the head of Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. Their joint
report states, “that a considerable amount of horizontal shafting under
seven feet from the floor has been securely cased over in various parts
of the country, and that strap-hooks and other contrivances for the
prevention of accidents from horizontal shafts above seven feet from
the floor, have been and are now being extensively employed in all
our districts, excepting in that of Lancashire, and in places mainly
influenced by that example.” And Mr. Howell is to be found reporting
that in the west of England much new fencing had been done, and that
the experiment had “been tried on a sufficiently large scale, and for
a sufficiently long period to prove the fallacy of the apprehensions
that were expressed, as to the practicability and success of fencing
securely horizontal shafts. It has proved also that the doing so is
unaccompanied by danger.” He gives illustration of this from the
west of England, adding, however, that “in many instances, and more
especially in the cotton factories in that part of my district which is
situate in Cheshire and on the borders of Lancashire, little or nothing
has yet been done, with some few conspicuous and honourable exceptions,
to satisfy the requirements of the law in this respect.”
The pamphlet adds the Manchester cry of Fire! and quotes the agent of
a fire-office, who gave it as his opinion, that if mills had boxed
machinery they ought to pay increased insurance, because “away
they would go without any possibility of salvation.” The agent of a
fire-office, as we all know, may be the butcher, the baker, or the
candlestick-maker, sage or not sage; and to judge by his language in
this particular case, not sage. Now, however, when a very large number
of mills out of Lancashire are habitually working fenced machinery,
will the National Association be so candid as to tell us--not what some
local agent has said, but what the fire-offices do?
Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the
pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger--would pull all about
the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer
represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question,
the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any
accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a
horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner
recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With
respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in
Yorkshire and other parts of my district--I mean the strap-hook, for
preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact
that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months
as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by
one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very
large number of factories, more or less in the different departments
of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my
district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed
for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook
does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents,
and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to
cause accidents.”
Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We
pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die,
die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it,
“climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural
reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman,
perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few
deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise
from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly
sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be
said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently
the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of
putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a
common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his
neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth
in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.
Need we do more than allude to such arguments as, that if law compels
the fencing of machinery (which while in motion thus can seize the
passive stander-by) it ought to compel windows to be barred, because
people can throw themselves out of them, and trees to be fenced,
because boys can climb up and tumble down? If we take thought for the
operative, working in the midst of dangerous machinery, are we, it is
asked, to legislate “for every drunken vagabond who lies down in the
track--every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk?” Need
we answer such preposterous inquiries?
We have maintained that it is strictly within the province of the
law to protect life, and to prohibit any arrangements by which it is
shown that the lives of people in pursuit of their lawful and useful
work, are without necessity endangered. Preventable accidents of every
kind we have always declared it to be the duty of the legislature to
prevent. We are told that Common Law suffices for all cases. It is
hardly worth while to spend time in showing that it does not, and
cannot provide for these cases. Common Law is the law as established
for a given and considerable length of time, and it arose out of the
fusion of much special legislation. It knew nothing of steam-engines,
and it is impossible that it should have foreseen such cases as
arise out of the new systems of railway and factory. Common Law will
not make factories safe working places for the operative; special
consideration must be given to the subject. When we learn, as Sir John
Kincaid reports from Scotland, that a sufficient fencing of three
hundred and fifty feet of horizontal shafting cost one factory only six
pounds; that the casing of two hundred and fifty-one feet of shafting
above seven feet from the floor--more precaution than was absolutely
needed--cost another factory only eight pounds four; that a Paisley
factory cased three hundred and twenty-four feet of such shafting
most efficiently with block iron casing, for no more than sixteen
pounds four, we refuse to listen to the cry of Mills on Fire--Ruinous
Expense--Manufactures must cease--Fatal Principles--Property going
to be pitched into the Atlantic--and simply wait until the recusant
Lancashire Mill-owners have done calling names and litigating, and have
learnt that if they will not voluntarily take the necessary steps to
prevent the more horrible sort of accidents in their mills, they must
take them by compulsion.
Miss Martineau suggests the impropriety of any discussion until doubt
has been removed by the settlement of a point raised before the Court
of Queen’s Bench. The whole matter is to remain in abeyance--things are
to go on as they are, and there are to be no convictions--while the
point mainly at issue is awaiting the decision of the higher courts.
Let us see what this means. The point at issue, as the pamphlet rightly
states, is the interpretation of the words “securely fenced;” and it
was agreed some time ago that in the case of a certain prosecution
for unfenced machinery, the question should go before the Queen’s
Bench to determine whether machinery could be said to be otherwise
than securely fenced when no accident could be shown to have been
caused by it; whether the fact that such machinery had led to deaths
and mutilations in other mills proved it, or did not prove it, to be
insecure in a mill where, as yet, no blood had been shed. The question
so raised is an obvious quibble, and even the known uncertainty of the
law could scarcely throw a doubt over the issue of a reference to its
supreme courts. Meanwhile the issue was raised. The great purpose and
business of the Association seemed to be to raise it. One, at least,
of the inspectors stood aside from the disputed class of prosecutions
till the doubt so raised should be definitively settled. We ourselves
now fall under reproof for not solemnly and silently awaiting the
decision of the question, whether securely fenced means so fenced as
that an accident shall not have happened, or so fenced that an accident
shall not arise. We now learn upon inquiry, that while we have been
waiting, and the Association has been claiming a twice-pending judicial
decision, we find--what do our readers suppose?--that no case whatever
awaits the opinion of the Judges!
We believe that we have now answered all the accusations laid against
ourselves in Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. There is one citation of
“actual resolutions of the Association,” side by side with our summary
of their purport, presented as a “conviction of the humanity-monger,”
of which we need say nothing, because it cannot fail to suggest to any
person only moderately prejudiced, that our summary is very close and
accurate indeed.
We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right.
There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not
open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor
of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor
the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of
Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it
as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of
fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality
were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,”
because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded
writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how
full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must
have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against
this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith.
“We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these--in every time
when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish
sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came
under his eye”--and then we have two notes of what he said against the
Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of
these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this,
affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a
way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not
miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys
was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins
one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the
same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to
the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?”
Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear!
We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds
of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part
in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We
thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy
paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her
pamphlet out of our remembrance.