Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger--would pull all about the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question, the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in Yorkshire and other parts of my district--I mean the strap-hook, for preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very large number of factories, more or less in the different departments of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents, and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to cause accidents.” Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die, die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it, “climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman, perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.