“Her wasted form seemed nothing— The load was at his heart, The sufferer he kept soothing Till at the mill they part. The overlooker met her, As to her frame she crept, And with his thong he beat her And cursed her as she wept. “All night with tortured feeling, He watched his speechless child, While, close beside her kneeling, She knew him not, nor smiled. Again the factory’s ringing Her last perceptions tried; When, from her straw bed springing, ‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[100] A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage from the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided a child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of age), the overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and he touches the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the corner of the room is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes this boy, and holding him up by his legs, dips him overhead in the cistern, and sends him to his task for the remainder of the day; and that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his work—he has no chance of drying himself.”[101] Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of the introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the ancients believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and destroy every vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not been shattered, even by a century and a quarter of disappointment. Happily, we in the United States have been practically free from some of the worst evils of England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we have to-day a child-labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the heart and brain of the nation to find a solution. We, too, are permitting the giant “iron men” to enslave our babies. The machine is our modern Moloch, and we feed it with precious child lives. III