Similar information is frequent from the metropolis and other districts. It is understood, and it may confidently be expected, that the Commissioners and Assistant Commissioners appointed to investigate the employment of young persons employed in large numbers in other manufactures than those now included in the provisions of the Factory Act will investigate more closely than has hitherto been done the sanitary condition of the labourers employed in the mines as well as in other branches of industry. I take the following evidence respecting the condition of the lodging-shops, obtained by _Dr. Mitchell_, one of the Assistant Commissioners, in the course of his inquiries into the condition of the labouring population engaged in working the mines in Durham and Northumberland. He gives the following description of their sleeping places:— “Many of the miners, including young persons and boys, will go three miles and upwards from their own homes in the morning to work in the mines, or to wash the ore, and return again after their work at night. Some miners, who are too far off to be able to go and come in this way, find lodgings for the four nights in the week, and the washers for five nights, at some houses not too far from the mines. The usual price is 6_d._ a-week each, for which sum there is a bed between two of them, leave to make their ‘crowdy’ on the fire in the morning, and they have their potatoes boiled for them in the evening. They bring their provisions in a wallet on the Monday mornings: the miners go back on the Friday, and the washers of ore on the Saturday. But there are many mines, and some of them very large, in remote situations in the Fells, far away from all dwelling-houses, where lodgings might be had, and the proprietors have erected for their miners and washers buildings called ‘lodging-shops,’ which I now am about to describe:—