"No doubt such earnings seem large to clerks, and educated men, who after receiving a costly education have often to struggle hard for bread; but they are nevertheless the rightful earnings of steady manual labour; and I have the pleasure of adding that, while all steady, well-disposed colliers, in good health, could make equally good wages, many hundreds in South Wales are quietly doing as much or more: witness a steady collier in my employment, with his two sons living at home, whose monthly pay ticket has averaged £30 for the past twelvemonth. "Another steady collier within my information, aided by his son, h as earned during the past five months upwards of £20 a month on the average, and from his manual labour as an ordinary collier--for it is of the working colliers and firemen I am speaking all along--he has built fifteen good houses, and, disregarding all menaces, he continues his habits of steady industry, whereby he hopes to accumulate an independence for his family in all events."] Iron-workers are paid a still higher rate of wages. A plate-roller easily makes three hundred a year.[2] The rollers in rail mills often make much more. In busy times they have made as much as from seven to ten guineas a week, or equal to from three to five hundred a year.[3] But, like the workers in cotton mills, the iron workers are often helped by their sons, who are also paid high wages. Thus, the under-hands are usually boys from fourteen years of age and upwards, who earn about nineteen shillings a week, and the helpers are boys of under fourteen, who earn about nine shillings a week. [Footnote 2: See Messrs. Fox, Head, and Co.'s return, in the Blue Book above referred to. This was the rate of wages at Middlesborough, in Yorkshire. In South Wales, the wages of the principal operatives engaged in the iron manufacture, recently, were--Puddlers. 9_s_. a day; first heaters on the rail mills. 8_s_. 9_d_. a day: second heaters, 11_s_. 7_d_.: roughers, 10_s_. 9_d_.: rollers, 13_s_. 2_d_., or equal to that amount.] [Footnote 3: Even at the present time, when business is so much depressed, the mill-rollers make an average wage of £5 10_s_. a week.] These earnings are far above the average incomes of the professional classes. The rail rollers are able to earn a rate of pay equal to that of Lieutenant-Colonels in Her Majesty's Foot Guards; plate-rollers equal to that of Majors of Foot; and roughers equal to that of Lieutenants and Adjutants. Goldsmith spoke of the country curate as "passing rich with forty pounds a year." The incomes of curates have certainly increased since the time when Goldsmith wrote, but nothing like the incomes of skilled and unskilled workmen. If curates merely worked for money, they would certainly change their vocation, and become colliers and iron-workers.