write their names with difficulty. The prevailing morals correspond with
these means of education. In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne asserts, and
supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no
moral sense among the workers. In general, he found that the children
neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for
them. They were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so
stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were
well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work
twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat,
and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards. They knew
nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil from
morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even
understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired.
{202}

In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers
also. On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed
here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health.
Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the
chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among
them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive
disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache,
biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia. By far
the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks,
which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early
death. The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent
posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the
quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which
fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled. The dry grinders'
average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders' rarely
exceeds forty-five. Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}

"I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only
by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the
longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent
from their work. There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.
About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between
the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age. The razor gr