work, it follows that their mental education is wholly neglected.
The day schools are not within their reach, the evening and Sunday
schools mere shams, the teachers worthless. Hence, few can read and
still fewer write. The only point upon which their eyes are as yet open
is the fact that their wages are far too low for their hateful and
dangerous work. To church they go seldom or never; all the clergy
complain of their irreligion as beyond comparison. As a matter of fact,
their ignorance of religious and of secular things, alike, is such that
the ignorance of the factory operatives, shown in numerous examples in
the foregoing pages, is trifling in comparison with it. The categories
of religion are known to them only from the terms of their oaths. Their
morality is destroyed by their work itself. That the overwork of all
miners must engender drunkenness is self-evident. As to their sexual
relations, men, women, and children work in the mines, in many cases,
wholly naked, and in most cases, nearly so, by reason of the prevailing
heat, and the consequences in the dark, lonely mines may be imagined. The
number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and
indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground; but
proves too, that the illegitimate intercourse of the sexes has not here,
as in the great cities, sunk to the level of prostitution. The labour of
women entails the same consequences as in the factories, dissolves the
family, and makes the mother totally incapable of household work.

When the Children's Employment Commission's Report was laid before
Parliament, Lord Ashley hastened to bring in a bill wholly forbidding the
work of women in the mines, and greatly limiting that of children. The
bill was adopted, but has remained a dead letter in most districts,
because no mine inspectors were appointed to watch over its being carried
into effect. The evasion of the law is very easy in the country
districts in which the mines are situated; and no one need be surprised
that the Miners' Union laid before the Home Secretary an official notice,
last year, that in the Duke of Hamilton's coal mines in Scotland, more
than sixty women were at work; or that the _Manchester Guardian_ reported
that a girl perished in an explosion in a mine near Wigan, and no one
troubled himself further about the fact that an infringement of the law
was thus revealed. In single cases the employment of w