d "give him bread, water, or small drink, and
refuse him meat, and cause him to work by beating, chaining, or
otherwise." If he should run away from this treatment, he could be
branded on the face with a hot iron with the letter S, and was to be the
slave of his master for life.

Nor does there appear to have been any radical improvement in the
condition of the workingman until within the memory of men now alive.
When Robert Owen made his celebrated journey in 1815 among the factory
towns of Great Britain, for the purpose of collecting evidence about the
employment of children in factories, he gathered facts which his son,
who traveled with him, speaks of as being too terrible for belief.

"As a rule," says that son (Robert Dale Owen), "we found children of ten
years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour's
interval for dinner, which was eaten in the factory.... Some mills were
run fifteen, and in exceptional cases sixteen hours a day, with a single
set of hands; and they did not scruple to employ children of both sexes
from the age of eight.... Most of the overseers carried stout leather
thongs, and we frequently saw even the youngest children severely
beaten."

This as recently as 1815! Mr. Holyoake himself remarks that, in his
youth, he never heard one word which indicated a kindly or respectful
feeling between employers and employed; and he speaks of the workshops
and factories of those days as "charnel-houses of industry." If there
has been great improvement, it is due to these causes: The resistance of
the operative class; their growth in self-respect, intelligence, and
sobriety; and the humanity and wisdom of some employers of labor.

The reader has perhaps seen an article lately printed in several
newspapers entitled: "Strikes and How to Prevent Them," by John Smedley,
a stocking manufacturer of Manchester, who employs about eleven hundred
persons. He is at the head of an establishment founded about the time of
the American Revolution by his grandfather; and during all this long
period there has never been any strike, nor even any disagreement
between the proprietors and the work-people.

"My ancestors' idea was," says Mr. Smedley, "that those who ride inside
the coach should make those as comfortable as possible who are
compelled, from the mere accident of birth, to ride outside."

That is the secret of it. Mr. Smedley mentions some of their modes of
proceeding, one of which is s