“‘These children, then,’ said I, ‘have no time to receive instruction.’ “‘That, sir,’ he replied, is the evil we have found. Girls are employed here from the age you see, till they marry, and then they know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or boil a potato. But we are remedying it now, and send the children to school for an hour after they have done work.’ “I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health. “‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are as healthy as any children in the world. To be sure, many of them as they grow up go off in consumption, but consumption is the disease of the English.’” This was not merely a temporary state of affairs, but an evil which came into being with the factory system, and grew steadily with its growth. Nor was it confined to any particular district. Not only in Lancashire, but everywhere that mills and factories were working, did the scandals of child-labour disgust Englishmen who did not happen to be mill-owners, and surprise and horrify foreigners, who at one and the same time saw England proposing to liberate the negro slaves, and permitting white slavery, almost as gross, in “the land of liberty.” [Sidenote: _CRUEL PRACTICES_] The things that Espriella saw in 1807 were the things, infinitely aggravated by the further extension of the factory system, that prevailed in 1832, when the scandal grew to such proportions that petitions were presented from all classes to Parliament, praying that legislation should be undertaken to end it. This movement resulted in a Factory Commission that revealed many unsuspected things. Not only were the factory owners guilty of working their miserable child-hands almost incredible hours, under the most dreadful conditions; but the parents, who practically sold their children into this slavery, were guilty equally with them. The report of the Factory Commission is a voluminous affair of many hundreds of folio pages. Many of those pages of evidence taken on oath disclose curiously varying ideas of what constituted cruelty in punishment, or excessive hours of labour for children. For example, a child ten years of age employed at Wigan was punished for being late at the factory, as many others were, by being forced to work with a rope round her neck, to which a 20-lb. weight was attached. There were those who did not regard this as anything at all out of the way, and declared the children so punished did not mind it. We can only wonder they did not say more, and insist that the victims rather enjoyed this torture. Mary Hooton, the mother of the girl, acknowledged that she told the overlooker to beat her.