Q. “If a child is kept in winter till twelve o’clock at night, and has then to go home and return to the factory in the morning, a distance of two miles, does not he undergo fearful hardships?” A. “Certainly.”[450] The children who were apprenticed out to the mill-owners were fed on the coarsest kind of food and in the most disgusting way. They slept by turns, in relays, in beds that were never aired, for one set of children were turned into the beds as soon as another set had been driven out to their long and filthy toil. Some tried to run away and after that they were worked with chains around their ankles; many died and the little graves were unmarked in a desolate spot lest the number of the dead attract too much attention. Sixteen hours a day, six days a week, was no uncommon time for children, and on Sunday they worked to clean the machine. “In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”[451] The agitation against these conditions led, in 1802, to an Act being passed by the influence of Sir Robert Peel for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills. The immediate cause of this was the fearful spread through the factories in the Manchester district of epidemic diseases due to overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, among the working people and especially among the children. As far as reforming the conditions in which the children lived, the Act, however, was a dead letter, and in a debate introduced by Sir Robert Peel on June 6, 1815, one speaker, Horner, told of the sale of a gang of children with the effects of a bankrupt. “A still more atrocious instance,” continued the speaker, “had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years ago, when a number of these boys apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer had been transferred (_i. e._, sold) to another and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine.”[452] No longer could people ignore conditions such as these and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was empowered to take evidence on the state of children working in the manufactories of Great Britain. Despite the horrible nature of the evidence, when the Act resulting from the investigation was passed, all that it did was to make nine years the limit to age employment and twelve hours a day the working day for those under sixteen years. But it was limited in effect to cotton factories only, leaving the woollen and worsted factories absolutely untouched, and even in the matter of the cotton factories these provisions were frequently avoided.