"There is one mode of engaging the labour of children and young persons in coal-mines, peculiar to a few districts, which deserves particular notice, viz. that by apprenticeship. The district in which the practice of employing apprentices is most in use, is South Staffordshire; it was formerly common in Shropshire, but is now discontinued; it is still common in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West of Scotland; in all the other districts, it appears to be unknown. In Staffordshire, the sub-commissioner states that the number of children and young persons working in the mines as apprentices is exceedingly numerous; that these apprentices are paupers or orphans, and are wholly in the power of the butties;[1] that such is the demand for this class of children by the butties, that there are scarcely any boys in the union workhouses of Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, and Stourbridge; that these boys are sent on trial to the butties between the ages of eight and nine, and at nine are bound as apprentices for twelve years, that is, to the age of twenty-one years complete; that, notwithstanding this long apprenticeship, there is nothing whatever in the coal-mines to learn beyond a little dexterity, readily acquired by short practice; and that even in the mines of Cornwall, where much skill and judgment is required, there are no apprentices, while, in the coal-mines of South Staffordshire, the orphan whom necessity has driven into a workhouse, is made to labour in the mines until the age of twenty-one, solely for the benefit of another." Thomas Moorhouse, a collier boy, who was brought to the notice of the Parliamentary commissioners, said— "I don't know how old I am; father is dead; I am a chance child; mother is dead also; I don't know how long she has been dead; 'tis better na three years; I began to hurry[2] when I was nine years old for William Greenwood; I was apprenticed to him till I should be twenty-one; my mother apprenticed me; I lived with Greenwood; I don't know how long it was, but it was a goodish while; he was bound to find me in victuals and drink and clothes; I never had enough; he gave me some old clothes to wear, which he bought at the rag-shop; the overseers gave him a sovereign to buy clothes with, but he never laid it out; the overseers bound me out with mother's consent from the township of Southowram; I ran away from him because he lost my indentures, for he served me very bad; he stuck a pick into me twice."