contact with rough objects, so that the fingers often bleed, and
are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this
dangerous substance. The consequence is violent pain, and serious
disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation, colic,
sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among children.
Among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colica pictorum, and
paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomena. One witness relates
that two children who worked with him died of convulsions at their work;
another who had helped with the dipping two years while a boy, relates
that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in
consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when
the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily,
accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is
paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use
of his limbs. In one factory were found in the dipping-house four men,
all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several
of whom were already epileptic. In short, this frightful disease follows
this occupation universally: and that, too, to the greater pecuniary
profit of the bourgeoisie! In the rooms in which the stoneware is
scoured, the atmosphere is filled with pulverised flint, the breathing of
which is as injurious as that of the steel dust among the Sheffield
grinders. The workers lose breath, cannot lie down, suffer from sore
throat and violent coughing, and come to have so feeble a voice that they
can scarcely be heard. They, too, all die of consumption. In the
Potteries district, the schools are said to be comparatively numerous,
and to offer the children opportunities for instruction; but as the
latter are so early set to work for twelve hours and often more per day,
they are not in a position to avail themselves of the schools, so that
three-fourths of the children examined by the commissioner could neither
read nor write, while the whole district is plunged in the deepest
ignorance. Children who have attended Sunday school for years could not
tell one letter from another, and the moral and religious education, as
well as the intellectual, is on a very low plane. {207}

In the manufacture of glass, too, work occurs which seems little
injurious to men, but cannot be endured by children. The hard labour,
the irregulari