=Source.=—Lord Beaconsfield’s _Sybil_, bk. iii., chap, i.
The last rays of the sun, contending with clouds of smoke that drifted
across the country, partially illumined a peculiar landscape. Far as
the eye could reach—and the region was level, except where a range of
limestone hills formed its distant limit—a wilderness of cottages, or
tenements that were hardly entitled to a higher name, were scattered
for many miles over the land; some detached, some connected in little
rows, some clustering in groups, yet rarely forming continuous streets,
but interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal, and
piles of smouldering ironstone; while forges and engine chimneys roared
and puffed in all directions, and indicated the frequent presence of
the mouth of the mine and the bank of the coal-pit....
They come forth; the mine delivers its gang and the pit its bondmen;
the forge is silent and the engine is still. The plain is covered
with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and
muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics;
troops of youth—alas! of both sexes—though neither their raiment nor
their language indicates the difference; all are clad in male attire;
and oaths that men might shudder at issue from lips born to breathe
words of sweetness. Yet these are to be—some are—the mothers of
England! But can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language,
when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the
waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their
legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl,
for twelve, sometimes for sixteen, hours a day, hauls and hurries
tubs of coal up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy:
circumstances that seem to have escaped the notice of the Society for
the Abolition of Negro Slavery. Those worthy gentlemen, too, appear
to have been singularly unconscious of the sufferings of the little
Trappers, which was remarkable, as many of them were in their own
employ.
See, too, these emerge from the bowels of the earth! Infants of four
and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and
timid; entrusted with the fulfilment of most responsible duties,
and the nature of which entails on them the necessity of being the
earliest to enter the mine and the latest to leave it. Their labour
indeed is not severe, for that would be impossible, but it is passed
in darkness and in solitude. They endure that punishment which
philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and
which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which
it is substituted. Hour after hour elapses and all that reminds the
infant Trappers of the world they have quitted and that which they
have joined, is the passage of the coal-waggons for which they open
the air-doors of the galleries, and on keeping which doors constantly
closed, except at this moment of passage, the safety of the mine and
the lives of the persons employed in it entirely depend.