Mrs. Trollope was actuated by humanitarian motives. This was not as usual then as since Dickens popularised the humanitarian novel. Only three years after he wrote _Sketches by Boz_, Mrs. Trollope wrote _The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong_, the story of a boy employed in the mills of Lancashire. Negro slavery in the South, even as Mrs. Trollope saw it, was a happy state of existence compared with child slavery in the mills of Ashleigh and Deep Valley, Lancashire, where the children were driven to work by the lash in the morning, and were crippled by the "Billy roller," the name of the stick by which they were beaten for inattention to their work during the day. If the truth of these horrors were not attested by other writers of this time, one would doubt the possibility of their existence in the same land and at the same time in which Wordsworth was writing of the beauties of his own childhood, where the river Derwent mingled its murmurs with his nurse's song. Mrs. Trollope assailed injustice with a powerful pen. Woman's moral nature is truer and more sensitive than man's. Even if her sympathies cloud her judgment, it is better than that her judgment should reason away her sympathies. Neither has woman in her philanthropy contented herself with broad principles which would help all and therefore reach none. The dusky slave in the cotton-fields, the pale-faced child in the cotton-mills, have alike touched the hearts of women, who by their pens have been able to awaken the conscience of a nation. The horror of child labour wrung from Mrs. Browning the heart-felt poem, _The Cry of the Children_. The four strong novels proclaiming the tyranny of the whites over the blacks, _Oronooko_, _Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw_, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and _The Hour and the Man_, were written by women. * * * * *