observer writes, "Certain savage-looking beings, male and
female, are seen in the country, black, livid, and sunburnt, and
belonging to the soil which they dig and grub with invincible
stubbornness. They stand erect, they display human lineaments, and seem
capable of articulation. They are, in fact, men. They retire at night
into their dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They
spare other human beings the trouble of sowing."

In pre-revolutionary France, the clergy, counting monks and nuns,
numbered, in 1762, over 400,000, with total possessions estimated at two
thousand million pounds, producing an annual revenue of about one
hundred and forty millions. The clergy were free from taxation and the
higher members of the order possessed all the rights and privileges of
the feudal nobility. To the end the Church in France, as in our day, in
pre-revolutionary Russia, remained the champion of privilege and
misgovernment.

In England, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, developed the English manufacturing
system. Woman-and child-labor were common in both mines and factories.
The regular working hours were from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M., with six full
days' labor per week. One investigator remarks: "It is a very common
practice with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in
large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and
Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children are sent off by
waggon loads at a time, and are as much lost for ever to their parents
as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind
them, by procuring a settlement for the children at the end of forty
days, get rid of them for ever; and the poor children have not a human
being in the world to whom they can look up for redress against the
wrongs they may be exposed to from these wholesale dealers in them,
whose object it is to get everything they can possibly wring from their
excessive labor and fatigue."

In the mines conditions were still worse, and a report in 1842 states:
"Children are taken at the earliest ages, if only to be used as living
and waving candlesticks, or to keep rats from a dinner, and it is in
pits of the worst character, too, in which most female children are
employed. It would appear from the practical returns obtained by the
commissioner, that about one-third of the persons employed in coal mines
are under e