§ 213. In an important paper which Dr. Calvert Holland has written “On the Diseases of the Lungs from mechanical causes,” he gives an account of the physical and moral condition of the cutlers’ dry grinders of Sheffield, whose case may be cited not only as further exemplifying the large evils, § 200, which, in the absence of protective public arrangements, will pass without complaint from the _immediate_ sufferers, but as showing the advantages derivable from any arrangements which bring large classes of cases within one intelligent view, _i. e._ before an officer of health, in presenting clearly common causes of evil, and in suggesting means of prevention, which in single cases or smaller groups of cases might not have challenged attention or justified any confident conclusions as to the remedies available. It is known that the steel and stone dust arising in the processes of grinding cutlery, is peculiarly injurious to the class of workpeople engaged in it, and that those who continue at the work are generally cut off before they are thirty-five or forty-five years of age. Formerly the same workmen completed several processes in the making of knives, of which processes grinding was only one. At that time the “grinders’ disease” was very little known, and the men lived to about the average age, and were considered the most respectable class of the Sheffield workmen. As the manufacture advanced the labour became subdivided, and one class of workmen were wholly occupied with the destructive process of grinding. Whether their numbers were kept down by the excessive mortality, or a monopoly were maintained by the destructive effects of the process, wages were so high as to allow them to play during a part of the week. Then arose that avidity for immediate and reckless enjoyment, common to all uneducated minds under the perception of a transient existence. When trade was good they would only work a part of the week; they spent the remainder in the riot and the dissipation characteristic of soldiers after a siege. Many of them each kept a hound, and had it trained by a master of the hunt, and their several hounds formed a pack with which they hunted lawlessly, and poached over any grounds within their reach. The grinders pack is still kept up amongst them. They became reckless in their marriages. “The more destructive the branch of work,” says Dr. Holland, “the more ignorant, reckless, and dissipated are the workmen, and the effects may be traced in the tendency to marry, and generally at exceedingly early ages.” He further observes of one class of them, that amongst them “nature appears not only precocious but extremely fruitful.” Their short and improvident career is attended by a proportionately large amount of premature and wretched widowhood and destitute orphanage.