t inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they
found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary
girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a
broth, or care for a child's needs or the simplest demands of a home.
Appalled at these conditions, France set about the organization of
industrial schools, and these have altered the whole face of affairs.

Generations of abuses had made, up to the time of the investigation, the
history of the working-class in France. One of their best-known
scientific observers, the statistician Villerme, examined in person, and
as one of the government inspecting committee reported on the condition
of dwellings in Lille, Amiens, and other manufacturing towns of France.
The weavers and spinners of Lille lived in caves, of which thirty-six
hundred were found occupied by families,--father, mother, and children
as soon as old enough, employed in the mills, and returning at night to
these dens, where filth and darkness periodically did their work of
decimation, and where infant mortality had reached the maximum.
Horrified at the discoveries made, three thousand of these dwellings
were at once destroyed. But for unknown and quite inscrutable reasons
six hundred were allowed to remain and receive double the original
number of tenants.[35] Years passed before the last cave was filled up,
the children born in them providing an enormous percentage for prison
and galleys. At Douai, Rouen, Roubaix, and many other points, such
hideous filth marked the homes of the working-class that Villerme
reported: "The walls are covered with a thousand layers of ordure." The
women, exhausted and depleted by a day's labor of from twelve to
fourteen hours, had no time to think of cleanliness. In fact, its
meaning had never been taught; and though industrial schools increase,
hours are now shortened, and inspection is active, it remains true that
almost the same conditions perpetuate themselves at many points,--the
descriptions given by the great realist, Zola, of women and children in
the mines, and the hideousness of their home life, being very literal
and unexaggerated fact.

As to conditions of the work itself, many trades and occupations require
for their proper carrying on methods and surroundings absolutely
destructive to health. In all preparation of hemp and oakum dust is
excessive; far beyond that of the cotton-mill, which itself breeds
consumption. In th