=Child Labour.=--Much attention has been given to the age of admission of children to work in the textile trades. At the Berlin Conference twelve was fixed as a sort of international minimum at which children should be allowed to enter upon factory labour. The age fixed by the British factory legislation of that time was ten for half-timers and fourteen for full-timers, or thirteen if the child had passed the prescribed educational standard. Our representatives, however, with the concurrence of the Government, endorsed the proposal for raising the age to twelve. When however the Factory Act of 1891 was being passed through the House of Commons, the opposition of Lancashire and Yorkshire overcame the good intentions of the Government. Instead of proposing to raise the age to twelve, they refused to alter the then existing law, with the result that they were beaten on Mr. Sydney Buxton’s amendment to raise the age to eleven. And most people--except of course directly interested parents and employers--who are acquainted with the unhealthy surroundings of mill life, are of opinion that eleven is too young an age at which to begin work, even as a half-timer. It is true that the certifying surgeon is empowered by the Factory Act to refuse a certificate to any child who appears to him to be from physical causes unfit for work; but the children are only submitted for examination once, either upon, or immediately after beginning work, so that their fitness for employment must therefore be more or less a matter of speculation. They are not again examined till they have become “young persons,” and a certain number whose employers manage to evade the law are never examined at all. =Other Textile Trades.=--The other branches of the textile trades, and the other districts in which those already referred to exist, are, with the exception of the linen trade, comparatively unimportant. Of those in the woollen-cloth trade, or such of it as still survives in the West of England, we find women who work in the factories at Trowbridge and Stroud earning about two-thirds of the wages of the Yorkshire women. There is no effective combination either amongst the men or the women. Wages have been fixed by custom, and they scarcely ever fluctuate. The low-water mark of factory wages is to be found in the Essex crape industry, where the women are in receipt of about 5_s._ a week.