They die like flies directly they are born. The tender-hearted may perhaps rejoice in this extravagant mortality. To some the waste of it will appear most apparent. In the Pottery Towns, for example, the infantile mortality is well up to 200 in the 1000: due, says the report, “to the employment of married women in the earthenware and china works.” A regular slaughter of innocents every year in Longton, says the Medical Officer of Health, “is due to this and premature births.” But the waste of death is the least element in this extravagance. “The damage done,” says another Medical Officer, “cannot entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the ranks of the degenerate.” Stunted, inefficient, overworked, underfed, they struggle towards maturity. Quaint and grotesque occupations are found for them; as for the “forty little girls, twenty-one of whom were half-timers,” who are found licking adhesive labels by the mouth at the rate of thirty gross a day, “whose tongues had the polished tip characteristic of label lickers, and the rest of the tongue coated with brown gum.” Or there are the girls who carry heavy wedges of clay and boxes of scrap (forbidden to such labour by the French Factory Laws of fourteen years ago); as in the “complaint awaiting investigation” from a mother of her daughter who has outgrown her strength, and is now ill with what she believes is consumption; “who when working complained much of pain in the shoulder on which she carried the clay and scrap, and of pain in the collar bone on the same side.” Or the children in the Nottingham lace trade, whose eyesight is impaired or destroyed by the double work of school and employment; and the half-time school at Dundee, where “narrow-chested children sit on backless benches”; or the half-timers at Belfast, “undersized, round-shouldered, delicate in appearance,” where the head teacher testifies, “these children seem always tired; during the recreation period they prefer sitting down in the playground to running about, and in this matter they are especially noticeable in comparison with the children who do not work.” They struggle towards maturity, unorganised, unprotected; fined in one dressmaking workshop in West London in fines which were supposed to be sent to the Fresh Air Fund--a statement which, says the inspector, “had no foundation in fact”; or “verbally promised 2s. 6d.” for making a sample silk blouse, for which “when Saturday came, the occupier, instead of giving the agreed price, refused to pay more 1s. 3d.” Most of them will die under thirty, is the testimony of the teacher concerning her half-time pupils; but if they live it out, in old age they will be once more dragged in by fear and bewilderment to compete against the coming generations, and make the life of those coming generations more difficult to endure.