, or fish to eat, with veal from calves
killed too young, and pork from swine smothered during transportation,
and such food is furnished not by small employers only, but by large
manufacturers, who employ from thirty to forty apprentices. The custom
seems to be universal in Wolverhampton, and its natural consequence is
frequent bowel complaints and other diseases. Moreover, the children
usually do not get enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing than
their working rags, for which reason, if for no other, they cannot go to
Sunday school The dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much so that
they give rise to disease; and in spite of the not materially unhealthy
work, the children are puny, weak, and, in many cases, severely crippled.
In Willenhall, for instance, there are countless persons who have, from
perpetually filing at the lathe, crooked backs and one leg crooked, "hind-
leg" as they call it, so that the two legs have the form of a K; while it
is said that more than one-third of the working-men there are ruptured.
Here, as well as in Wolverhampton, numberless cases were found of
retarded puberty among girls, (for girls, too, work at the forges,) as
well as among boys, extending even to the nineteenth year. In Sedgeley
and its surrounding district, where nails form almost the sole product,
the nailers live and work in the most wretched stable-like huts, which
for filth can scarcely be equalled. Girls and boys work from the tenth
or twelfth year, and are accounted fully skilled only when they make a
thousand nails a day. For twelve hundred nails the pay is 5.75d. Every
nail receives twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs 1.25 pounds, the
nailer must lift 18,000 pounds to earn this miserable pay. With this
hard work and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop
ill-formed, undersized frames, and the commissioners depositions confirm
this. As to the state of education in this district, data have already
been furnished in the foregoing chapters. It is upon an incredibly low
plane; half the children do not even go to Sunday school, and the other
half go irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts,
can read, and in the matter of writing the case is much worse. Naturally,
for between the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to
get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the
Sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and