“These children were often sent one, two, or three hundred miles from their place of birth, separated for life from all relations. It had been known that with a bankrupt’s effect a gang ... of these children had been put up to sale and were advertised publicly as a part of the property ... a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine.... Not many years ago an agreement had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer ... that with every twenty sound children, one idiot should be taken!” (p. 11). _Report of Commissioners, 1833, from Scotland_, p. 41. _Evidence of a Spinner._ “I find it difficult to keep my _piecers_ awake the last hours of a winter evening; have seen them fall asleep and go on performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the _billey_ had stopped. When their work was over, I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of _piecening_ when they were fast asleep, when there was no work to do, and they were doing nothing; children at night are so fatigued that they are asleep often as soon as they sit down, so that it is impossible to wake them to sense enough to wash themselves, or even to eat a bit of supper, being so stupid in sleep” (p. 19). _Half-overseer’s evidence._ Does not like the long hours; he is very tired and hoarse at night and that some of the young female workers in his, the spinning flat, have so swelled legs, one in particular, from standing so long, about 17 years old, that she can hardly walk; that various of them have their feet bent in and their legs crooked from the same cause (p. 21). FOOTNOTES: [30] Denied by Anglicans to-day. [31] Lays, leys, or leas, is an old name for the common fields about a village. [32] East India Co. had, in 1757, taken responsibility for the defence of Bengal, and been involved in war with the heir to the Mogul throne, 1759; the Nawab Mir Kasim, 1763; the Mahrattas, 1765; they also sold arms and artillery to natives. INDEX