The parish had the right to apprentice the children of poor parents to any trade.... Children under this law might be sent to any part of the Kingdom. “It is a very common practice,” wrote Romilly in 1811, “with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in large numbers to the proprietors of cotton mills ... at a distance of 200 miles.... The children, who are sent off by waggon loads at a time, are as much lost for ever to their parents as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind them get rid of them for ever, and the poor children have not a human being in the world to whom they can look up for redress ... from these wholesale dealers whose object it is to get everything that they can wring from their excessive labours and fatigue.... Instances (and not very few) have occurred in our criminal tribunals of wretches who have murdered their parish apprentices that they might get fresh premiums with new apprentices.” Some manufacturers, it is shocking to state, agreed to take one idiot for every nineteen sane children. Even naturally humane men were found to defend these dreadful abuses in the House of Commons. Here is an extract from a speech: “Although in the higher ranks of society it was true that to cultivate the affections of children for their family was the source of every virtue, yet it was not so among the lower orders.... It would be highly injurious to the public to put a stop to the binding of so many apprentices to the cotton manufacturers, as it must necessarily raise the price of labour and enhance the price of cotton manufactured goods!” We turn next to the debtor’s prison which is so prominent in the “Pickwick Papers.” So resolute was Mr. Pickwick not to submit to the judgment against him in the famous trial that he allowed himself to be imprisoned in the Fleet. He was first put into the Warden’s room with several other prisoners. When he entered the room, the others were absent. “So he sat down on the foot of his little iron bedstead, and began to wonder how much a year the warden made out of the dirty room. Having satisfied himself, by mathematical calculation, that the apartment was about equal in annual value to a freehold in a small street in the suburbs of London,” etc., etc.