thrown out of work, and lower wages were paid to those who took their
place. This led directly to the breaking up of the home and home-life.
The wives were often obliged to spend twelve to thirteen hours a day
in the mills; the very young children, left to themselves, grew up
like wild weeds and were often put out to nurse at a shilling or
eighteenpence a day.

One reads of tired children driven to their work with blows; of
children who, "too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the
drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the
factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night
that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite,
that their parents found them kneeling by the bedside where they had
fallen asleep during their prayers."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the greatest poets of Victoria's
reign, pleads for mercy and human kindness in her "Cry of the
Children."

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west--
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.

"For oh," say the children, "we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark underground--
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round."

In the country the state of affairs was no better. New systems of
industrial production threw large numbers of farm hands out of work,
the rate of wages fell, and machinery, steam, and the work of women
and children took the place of the labourer.

The children found a champion in Lord Ashley, afterward Lord
Shaftesbury, who succeeded in the face of much opposition in his
efforts to pass laws which shoul