the arrival of the happy period
when they may live on their offspring, not their offspring on them.
Thus the purest and best affections of the heart are obliterated on
the very threshold of life. That best school of disinterestedness and
virtue, the _domestic hearth_, where generosity and self-control are
called forth in the parents, and gratitude and affection in the
children, from the very circumstance of the dependence of the latter
on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than destroyed, it is made
the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists only to nourish
the selfish and debasing passions. Children come to be looked on, not
as objects of affection, but as instruments of gain; not as forming
the first duty of life and calling forth its highest energies, but as
affording the first means of relaxing from labour, and permitting a
relapse into indolence and sensuality. The children are, practically
speaking, sold for slaves, and--oh! unutterable horror!--_the sellers
are their own parents_! Unbounded is the demoralization produced by
this monstrous perversion of the first principles of nature. Thence
it is that it is generally found, that all the beneficent provisions
of the legislature for the protection of infant labour are so
generally evaded, as to render it doubtful whether any law, how
stringent soever, could protect them. The reason is apparent. The
parents of the children are the chief violators of the law; for the
sake of profit they send them out, the instant they can work, to the
mills or the mines. Those whom nature has made their protectors, have
become their oppressors. The thirst for idleness, intoxication, or
sensuality, has turned the strongest of the generous, into the most
malignant of the selfish passions.

The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are
not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in
life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating
mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up
utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of
reading or writing, but of ignorance in still more momentous
particulars, with reference to their usefulness in life as wives and
mothers. They can neither bake nor brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit.
The finest London lady is not more utterly inefficient than they are,
for any other object but the one mechanical occupation to which they
have been habituated. The