"'I have known my children get strapped two or three times between a meal. At all times of the day. Sometimes they would escape for a day or two together, just as it might happen. Then they get strapped for being too late. They make the children sum up, that is, pick up the waste, and clean up the billies during the meal-time, so that the children don't get their time. The cruelty complained of in the factories is chiefly from the slubbers. There is nobody so closely connected with the children as the slubbers. There is no other part of the machinery with which I am acquainted where the pay of the man depends on the work of the children so much.'" "Joseph Badder, a slubber, deposed: 'Slubbing and spinning is very heavy. Those machines are thrown aside now. The spinners did not like them, nor the masters neither. They did not turn off such stuff as they expected. I always found it more difficult to keep my piecers awake the last hours of a winter's evening. I have told the master, and I have been told by him that I did not half hide them. This was when they were working from six to eight. I have known the children hide themselves in the store among the wool, so that they should not go home when the work was over, when we have worked till ten or eleven. I have seen six or eight fetched out of the store and beat home; beat out of the mill. However, I do not know why they should hide themselves, unless it was they were too tired to go home. My piecers had two hours for meals. Other parts of the work I have known them work children, from seven to twelve in age, from six in the morning till ten or eleven at night, and give no time for meals; eat their victuals as they worked; the engines running all the time. The engine never stopped at meal-times; it was just as the spinner chose whether the children worked on or not. They made more work if they went on. I never would allow any one to touch my piecers. The foreman would come at times, and has strapped them, and I told him I would serve him the same if he touched them. I have seen the man who worked the other billy beat his piecers. I have seen children knocked down by the billy-rollers. It is a weapon that a man will easily take up in a passion. I do not know any instance of a man being prosecuted for it. The parents are unwilling, for fear the children should lose their work. I know Thorpe has been up before the magistrate half a dozen times or more, on the complaint of the parents. He has been before the bench, at the Exchange, as we call it, and I have seen him when he came back, when the magistrates have reprimanded Thorpe, and told the parents they had better take the children away. After that he has been sometimes half drunk, perhaps, and