A further change in the history of manufacture, however, occurred. The steam-engine was invented, and when its power was applied to manufacture, it was no longer necessary to build factories where water-power was at hand; they were henceforth principally established in towns. Apprentices were now but little employed; free, paid child-labour, here to be obtained in abundance, was preferred by the mill-owners. They had never wished for apprentices; the charge of them had always entailed considerable trouble; the responsibility was felt heavily by conscientious masters, whilst the legal restrictions of Sir Robert Peel's Act prevented the avaricious and hard-hearted from profiting by the abuses of the system. Apprenticeship therefore died a natural death. It might be thought that children employed under the new plan, receiving wages and living at home under the protection of their parents, would suffer no hardships calling for legal restraint; but representations having been made to the Government that abuses had crept in, a Royal Commission of inquiry was determined upon in 1833. On this occasion Dr Southwood Smith was appointed by the Government a member of this Commission, conjointly with Mr Tooke and Mr Edwin Chadwick.[14] Their first work was to send district commissioners into the manufacturing regions to collect evidence, and the results of those inquiries were embodied in the general Report. My grandfather took a deep interest in the subject, for the evils disclosed by the inspection, if not so great as they had been under the apprenticeship system, were still sufficiently appalling: children, some of them not more than five years old, were obliged to work the same number of hours as the adult operatives--twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours a-day--sometimes the whole night; their health was thus often ruined for life; neither time nor strength remained for education; they were growing up totally ignorant; and they were, besides, often unkindly treated. It is sad to see in the Report such words as these, quoted from the children's lips: "I am sick tired, especially in the winter nights." "So tired when I leave the mill that I can do nothing." "I feel so tired when I gang home that I throw myself down, no caring what I does." "So tired I am not able to set one foot by the other." "Many a time I have been so fatigued I could hardly take off my clothes at night, or put them on in the morning. My mother would be raging at me, because when I sat down I could not get up again through the house." As to their ruined health, such sentences as these foretell it: "Many nights I do not get a wink of sleep from the pain." "My knees failed from the work." Or, "Severe pains would come on, particularly in the morning." The evidence of the overseers and managers is scarcely less strong than that of the little sufferers themselves.