ost epidemic among them. {193}

This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the
bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! Only
a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers' daughters,
a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its
equally "vile" children and children's children. But what does that come
to? Nothing, nothing whatsoever! Our English bourgeoisie will lay the
report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives and
daughters will deck themselves with lace as before. It is a beautiful
thing, the composure of an English bourgeois.

A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing
establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. In
no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such
brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers.
The application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the
discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such
cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application
of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new
arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much
more than was the case in the production of the fabrics. One man, with
the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done
formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of
printed cloth per minute. The calico printers are in a very bad way in
consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced
(according to a petition of the printers to the House of Commons), in the
year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton goods: of these, 100,000
were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in part with machinery and in
part by hand, and 10,000,000 by machinery alone, with four to six
colours. As the machinery is chiefly new and undergoes constant
improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too great for the
available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore starving; the
petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the rest are
employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week, and are
ill-paid. Leach {194} asserts of one print-work (Deeply Dale, near Bury,
in Lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more
than five shillings, though he knows that the