We never said, or meant to say, that things were as bad in the Black Country now as they were fifty, forty, or twenty years ago. We are quite ready to believe, with a more courteous and kindly Black Country correspondent than Mr. Lawley, that much has been done, and that much is doing, for religion, education and civilization in that region as everywhere else. * * * * * If _Mr. Punch_ has been unfair to the Black Country, he has, at least, been sinning in good company. Hear what Mr. Justice Keating spoke from the Bench, in a Black Country case, not three weeks ago:-- "I cannot help noticing the most deplorable state of matters shown by the evidence of these girls. We call ourselves a Christian people and pride ourselves upon being a civilized nation. These two girls have said that they could neither read nor write; that they had never in their lives been at school, church or chapel; that they had never heard of the Bible; and, as the learned counsel had suggested, in all probability they had never heard of a Divine Being. We send out missionaries to the heathen, but what avails all this when we see such a state of things at home?" The introduction of the Metalliferous Mines Bill in the Lords in July, 1872, prompted _Punch_ to express his ironic satisfaction:-- Would you be surprised to hear that we already protect women and children to this extraordinary extent? No children under 15 are sent down into the mines, and women are not worked more than twelve hours, and--will you believe it?--not at all on Sundays. In the same month the Lords read a second time the Bill for protecting children against those who cruelly train them to become acrobats. There is hardly a single mention throughout all these years of efforts to secure humane treatment for working children in which the honoured name of Lord Shaftesbury is not prominent, as it was in this debate. There was, as _Punch_ says, no sentimentality about this interference, and we ought not to leave children to be tortured for the delectation of the lower class of folks, well-dressed or not, who are pleased by unnatural acrobatic feats. It gave _Punch_ no pleasure to write sermons on Blue Books, least of all when the Blue Books only gave him the blues. He usually abstained from the discussion of merely painful subjects. But just indignation often forced him to make exceptions. Thirty years after the passage of the first, and nine after the passage of the second Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, a very bad case of evasion occurred in the North of England:-- We take this paragraph from the _Pall Mall Gazette_:--