These evils are real, general, and of ruinous consequence. When children--from the age of nine or ten in some establishments, of thirteen or fourteen in all--are able to earn wages varying from 3s. 6d. to 6s. a-week, they soon become in practice independent of parental control. The strongest of all securities for filial obedience--a sense of dependence--is destroyed. The children assert the right of self-government, because they bear the burden of self-maintenance. Nature, in the ordinary case, has effectually guarded against this premature and fatal emancipation of the young, by the protracted period of weakness during childhood and adolescence, which precludes the possibility of serious labour being undertaken before the age when a certain degree of mental firmness has been acquired. But the steam-engine, amidst its other marvels, has entirely destroyed, within the sphere of its influence, this happy and necessary exemption of infancy from labour. Steam is the moving power; it exerts the strength; the human machine is required only to lift a web periodically, or damp a roller, or twirl a film round the finger, to which the hands of infancy are as adequate as those of mature age. Hence the general employment of children, and especially girls, in such employments. They are equally serviceable as men or women, and they are more docile, cheaper, and less given to strikes. But as these children earn their own subsistence, they soon become rebellious to parental authority, and exercise the freedom of middle life as soon as they feel its passions, and before they have acquired its self-control.