The pamphlet then adopts the precise tone of the mill-owners in speaking of the accidents as chiefly “of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the act.” In the next place the yearly deaths by preventable accidents from machinery, which number about forty, are reduced to eleven, by excluding all machinery except the actual shafts, and throughout the pamphlet afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is used--once in a way that has astonished us, as it will certainly surprise our readers. Even lower down on the same page the writer slips into the statement, that there are only twelve deaths a-year by “mill-accidents from all kinds of factory machinery.” We wish it were so; but in the last report, published before we made our comments, there were twenty-one slain in six months; one hundred and fifty had, in six months, lost parts of their right hands; one hundred and thirty, parts of their left hands; twenty-eight lost arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had bones broken; a hundred had suffered fracture or serious damage to the head and face. In the report for the half-year next following, the deaths by machinery in factories were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-one lost the right hand, or, more generally, parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and twenty had bones broken. Thirty-nine, therefore, was the number of deaths in the year last reported (a fresh half-yearly report is at present due), and there was no lack of accidents more serious than the “rubbing off a bit of skin.” Of the factory accidents, we are also told, not five per cent. are owing to machinery. If so, great indeed must be the number of the whole! But it is solely of the accidents arising from machinery that we from the first have spoken, since upon them only the law is founded which we wish to see maintained.