So far as we can understand the figures of the pamphlet, they arise from the ingenuity of some friend, who has eliminated from the rest those accidents arising out of actual contact with a shaft, and then put this part for the whole. But the law says, “That every fly-wheel directly connected with the steam-engine or water-wheel, or other mechanical power, whether in the engine-house or not, and every part of a steam-engine and water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near to which children or young persons are liable to pass or be employed, and all parts of the mill-gearing in a factory shall be securely fenced.” The whole controversy is about obedience to this law, and the consequences of resistance to it. The most horrible and fatal accidents are those connected most immediately with the shafts; the unfenced shafts are the essential type of the whole question, and the fencing of them implies necessarily the general consent to obey the law. For this reason we have, no doubt, in common with other people, frequently represented by such a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of resistance to the law, without any suspicion of the ingenious turn that might be given to the question on this ground, by an Association not ashamed to employ sleight of hand in argument. And now that we discuss the figures of the pamphlet, we turn to another of the strange pages, headed Mis-statements in Household Words. We make, it is said, the extraordinary statement, that these deadly shafts “mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures; and considering,” the writer adds, “the magnitude of this exaggeration (our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers produce facts in answer to romance,” we proceed, it is said, “to beg the question as usual; in this passage: ‘As for ourselves, we admit freely, that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised or savage.’”