desponding, degrading variety of laborious vegetation or shameless intemperance. Relieve him in this particular, shorten his hours of labour, and he will find himself possessed of sufficient leisure to make it an object with him to spend that leisure well; he will not be so thoroughly enervated with his day's employment; he will not feel so imperious a necessity for stimulating liquors; he will examine more closely, and regulate more carefully, his domestic arrangements, and what is more than all, he will become a soil which the religious philanthropist may have some chance of labouring with advantage. We do not say that a reduction in the hours of labour would do everything; but we are sure that little can be done without it." Arthur Arnold. _Cotton Famine._ 1864. (Describing factory work.) Page 56. "In these days of automaton machinery there are many moments in every hour when the varied and immense production of a cotton factory would continue though 95 per cent of the hands were suddenly withdrawn. The work is exciting but not laborious. It quickens the eye and the action of the brain to watch a thousand threads, being obliged to dart upon and repair any that break, lest even a single spindle should be idle; and it strengthens the brain to do this with bodily labour which is exercising but not exhausting. It polishes the mental faculties to work in continued contact with hundreds of others, in a discipline necessarily so severe and regular as that of a cotton factory. The bodily system becomes feverishly quickened by thus working in a high and moist temperature. Even the rattle of the machinery contributes to preserve the brain of the operative from that emptiness which so fatally contracts its power." THE SURAT WEAVER'S SONG From Edwin Waugh's _Factory Folk_, p. 238. By Samuel Laycock. Confound it! aw ne'er wur so woven afore; My back's welly broken, mi fingers are sore; Aw've bin stannin' an' workin' among this Surat Till aw'm very neer gettin' as blint as a bat. Aw wish aw wur fur eneagh off, eawt o' th' road, For o' weaving this rubbitch aw'm gettin' reet sto'd; Aw've nowt i' this world to lie deawn on but straw, For aw've nobbut eight shillen' this fortnit to draw. Oh dear! if yon Yankees could nobbut just see Heaw they're clemmin' an' starvin' poor weavers like me, Aw think they'd soon settle their bother an' strive To send us some cotton to keep us alive. There's theawsan's o' folk, jist i' th' best o' their days, Wi' traces of want plainly sin i' their face; An' a future afore 'em as dreary as dark, For when th' cotton gets done we's be o' eawt o' wark.