A. “I can speak from information derived from two or three mill-owners, and also more extensively from reports by one of the superintendents in my district; and I should say that in most of the mills they do detain them at night; in some of them, the report states that they are detained all night, in order to be ready when wanted.” Q. “Are the children that are so detained liable to be detained throughout the day, and do they sometimes begin their work at twelve o’clock at night?” A. “In the mills at Nottingham there are owners that make it a rule that they will not keep the children after eight, or nine, or ten o’clock, according to the inclination of the mill-occupier.” Q. “Where are those children during the time they are detained in the mill?” A. “_When detained at night, and not employed I am told they are lying about on the floor._” Q. “Is it customary to close at eight on Saturday evening in the lace-mills?” A. “I think it is.” Q. “How then do they compensate for the loss of those four hours work in those mills?” A. “_By working all night on Friday_; those are the mills in which they pay so much for their power.” Q. “Must not there be a considerable wear and tear upon the physical constitution of children who are kept in this state?” A. “I think it is self-evident.” Q. “Is there any possibility of their obtaining education under those circumstances?” A. “None whatever, except on Sundays.” Q. “But, after one hundred and twenty hours’ work in the week, is it possible that they can have much capacity for study on Sunday?” A. “It is not always that the same children are kept twenty hours, because some mills have two complete sets of hands for their machinery, and they work the same set of hands only ten hours.” Q. “But, even under those circumstances, it must frequently happen that the same children are employed during the night twice or thrice in the course of a week?” A. “The practice generally is that they take the night-work for one week, and then the next week the morning-work.” Q. “So that during one whole week they are employed in the night-work?” A. “Yes.” Q. “At the end of a week, during which they have been employed in the night, do you think that they have much capacity left for study on Sunday?” A. “No; my opinion is most decidedly that either turning out at four o’clock in the morning, or being kept out of bed at night, must be injurious to children, both to their physical constitution and their mental powers.” Q. “The law, as it stands, does not prevent the children from being employed even twenty hours?” A. “It does not apply to lace-mills.” Q. “Therefore the period during which the child is employed depends upon the varying humanity of the individual proprietor of the mill?” A. “Yes.” Q. “You say that it sometimes happens that the children come to the mill at five in the morning, and do not leave it till ten at night?” A. “It is reported to me that it does so happen about Chesterfield.”