The manufacturers who attributed Ashley's professions of friendship for their employees to his class hatred of their masters little knew the man. His sympathies were engaged in behalf of the poor and weak in every calling, and the mill-hands were only the first whose cause he championed. The manufacturers had sometimes sought to divert attention from their own shortcomings by pointing to the greater hardship of the colliery workers, and in 1840 Lord Ashley took up this subject by moving for a parliamentary commission to inquire into the employment of the children of the poorer classes in mines and collieries. The first report of this commission, issued in 1842, is one of the most appalling of public documents. Sworn testimony was presented to show that much of the underground labor was performed by children under thirteen years of age, and that little boys and girls were set to work in the dark and noisome tunnels at the age of five. First as "trappers" these child laborers opened and shut the trap-doors in the passages of the mine. The stronger children, boys and girls alike, dragged and pushed the little coal wagons along the narrow passages--the roofs too low for them to stand upright, often so low as to compel them to creep on all- fours in the black slime of the floors. Some with laden baskets on their backs climbed many times a day up steep ascents. Some stood ankle-deep in water from morning till night in the depths of the pit, wearing out their little lives at the hand- pumps. "The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest; The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west. But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free."