These special rules, however, were concerned more with general dusty evils and affected potter’s asthma rather than the lead poisoning question. But in 1898 Prof. Thorpe and Dr Oliver drew up their celebrated report on lead poisoning for the Home Office—a report which for a time threw the whole trade into the most furious excitement. The doctors averred that glaze could be made without lead, or without lead in any but the innocuous “fritted” state. What the employers said was emphatic and contradictory. They threatened to close down the whole trade, and no doubt the report was hasty and ill-considered. For four years the controversy raged, and at last in 1902 an arbitration court was held before Lord James of Hereford. Under his award a new set of special rules were drawn up. These rules, besides enforcing sanitary provisions such as those for monthly medical inspection of workers “in the lead,” compelled those manufacturers who continued to use lead in a dangerous state to compensate those of their workers who suffered from lead poisoning, a liability now generally embodied in the 1907 Workmen’s Compensation Act. When one remembers the intense hostility to this Home Office interference, it is curious to see how satisfactory and easily the rules have worked in practice. Potter’s asthma is nearly extinct, and lead-poisoning cases in the Potteries have fallen from an average of 362 a year in the period 1896-8 to 93 a year over the years 1905-7.[215] About 5 per cent of the cases result in death. The chief credit for this new departure should be attributed to William Owen of the Potters’ Union, and to the Duchess of Sutherland and Sir Charles Dilke. The latest statistics of the industry show that in 1901 there were about 400 factories employing some 21,000 adult males, 16,000 adult females, and 13,000 young persons under 18 years of age.[216] The employment of great numbers of married women (some 8,000) and the consequent high rate of infantile mortality are now the most serious features of the industry from the sociological point of view. In conclusion the official figures are given for the export of china and earthenware, so as to show the prosperity at different times of the staple trade of North Staffordshire. APPENDIX I. The Foreign Trade, since 1840. Exports and Imports.