So reports Mr. Holyoake, who could produce, if necessary, from the records of parliamentary investigations, many a ream of similar testimony. In truth, workingmen were scarcely regarded--nay, they were _not_ regarded--as members of the human family. We find proof of this in the ancient laws of every country in Europe. In the reign of Edward VI. there was a law against idle workmen which shows how they were regarded. Any laboring man or servant loitering or living idly for the space of three days could be branded on the breast with the latter V (vagabond) and sentenced to be the slave of the person who arrested him for two years; and that person could "give him bread, water, or small drink, and refuse him meat, and cause him to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." If he should run away from this treatment, he could be branded on the face with a hot iron with the letter S, and was to be the slave of his master for life. Nor does there appear to have been any radical improvement in the condition of the workingman until within the memory of men now alive. When Robert Owen made his celebrated journey in 1815 among the factory towns of Great Britain, for the purpose of collecting evidence about the employment of children in factories, he gathered facts which his son, who traveled with him, speaks of as being too terrible for belief. "As a rule," says that son (Robert Dale Owen), "we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour's interval for dinner, which was eaten in the factory.... Some mills were run fifteen, and in exceptional cases sixteen hours a day, with a single set of hands; and they did not scruple to employ children of both sexes from the age of eight.... Most of the overseers carried stout leather thongs, and we frequently saw even the youngest children severely beaten." This as recently as 1815! Mr. Holyoake himself remarks that, in his youth, he never heard one word which indicated a kindly or respectful feeling between employers and employed; and he speaks of the workshops and factories of those days as "charnel-houses of industry." If there has been great improvement, it is due to these causes: The resistance of the operative class; their growth in self-respect, intelligence, and sobriety; and the humanity and wisdom of some employers of labor. The reader has perhaps seen an article lately printed in several newspapers entitled: "Strikes and How to Prevent Them," by John Smedley, a stocking manufacturer of Manchester, who employs about eleven hundred persons. He is at the head of an establishment founded about the time of the American Revolution by his grandfather; and during all this long period there has never been any strike, nor even any disagreement between the proprietors and the work-people.