By that admission we abide--and by our figures we abide. This specimen of our mis-statements, of our “begging the question as usual,” is a yet more curious example of a question begged by the accusers, than that other proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not having read a document several weeks before it came into existence. We said, in the passage above cited, that the deadly shafts “mangled or murdered” so many persons a-year; that by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of the law, two thousand persons were mutilated or killed. The writer of the pamphlet has been led to beg wholly the addition of the mutilated on our side, and to set against it, on her side, only the killed, and not all those: only a selection from them of the persons _actually killed on shafts_; advantage being taken of the use of the phrase, deadly shafts, to represent machinery in unfenced mills. And that it is really meant, in the writer’s own phrase to “ignore” the fact that we counted the killed, is evident from a succeeding sentence. “If Mr. Dickens, or his contributor, assigns his number of two thousand a-year, his opponents may surely cite theirs--of three-and-a-half per cent. or twelve in a-year.” Our number, certainly, was wrong; but it erred only by under-statement. We might have said nearly four thousand, without falsehood. The number of deaths and mutilations together arising from machinery in factories, has been two thousand, not in a year, but half a year. Because we did not wish to urge the slight cuts, and the few scarcely avoidable mishaps which did not belong fairly to the case as we were stating it, we struck off some two thousand from the number that we might have given.