nly.

The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything
that is known to me in this line. Such infamies, as are here related,
are nowhere else to be found--yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie
constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own
favour. The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly
enough. The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared
before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours.
This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and
legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of Leeds:
{152b}

"I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones
before I came to Leeds. At first I thought it was rachitis, but I was
soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of patients
who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances of the
disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year) in
which children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by the
circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began
to work in the mills. Thus far I have seen about a hundred such
cases, and can, most decidedly, express the opinion that they are the
consequences of overwork. So far as I know they were all mill
children, and themselves attributed the evil to this cause. The
number of cases of curvature of the spine which have fallen under my
observation, and which were evidently consequent upon too protracted
standing, was not less than three hundred."

Precisely similar is the testimony of Dr. Ray, for eighteen years
physician in the hospital in Leeds: {153a}

"Malformations of the spine are very frequent among mill-hands; some
of them consequent upon mere overwork, others the effect of long work
upon constitutions originally feeble, or weakened by bad food.
Deformities seem even more frequent than these diseases; the knees
were bent inward, the ligaments very often relaxed and enfeebled, and
the long bones of the legs bent. The thick ends of these long bones
were especially apt to be bent and disproportionately developed, and
these patients came from the factories in which long work-hours were
of frequent occurrence."

Surgeons Beaumont and Sharp, of Bradford, bear the same testimony. The
reports of Drinkwater, Power, and Dr. Loudon contai