ilitary service. "The working men," says a recruiting surgeon, "are
small, delicate, and of very slight physical power; many of them
deformed, too, in the chest or spinal column." According to the
assertion of a recruiting sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller
than those anywhere else, being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall; out of
613 recruits, but 238 were found fit for service. As to education, a
series of depositions and specimens taken from the metal districts have
already been given, {200a} to which the reader is referred. It appears
further, from the Children's Employment Commission's Report, that in
Birmingham more than half the children between five and fifteen years
attend no school whatsoever, that those who do are constantly changing,
so that it is impossible to give them any training of an enduring kind,
and that they are all withdrawn from school very early and set to work.
The report makes it clear what sort of teachers are employed. One
teacher, in answer to the question whether she gave moral instruction,
said, No, for threepence a week school fees that was too much to require,
but that she took a great deal of trouble to instil good principles into
the children. (And she made a decided slip in her English in saying it.)
In the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder. The
moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable. Half of
all the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single year ninety
ten-years'-old offenders, among them forty-four serious criminal cases,
were sentenced. Unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the
opinion of the commissioner, almost universal, and that at a very early
age. {200b}

In the iron district of Staffordshire the state of things is still worse.
For the coarse wares made here neither much division of labour (with
certain exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. In
Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston,
Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories,
but chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with
one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first
year. The small employers are in about the same situation as those of
Birmingham; but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. They get
almost exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have died a
natural death, or tainted meat