d do away with such shameful wrong
and injustice.

The increased amount of coal used (15-1/2 million tons at the
beginning of the century, 64-1/2 million tons in 1854) naturally led
to the demand for more workers, and it was owing to this that the
proposals of Lord Shaftesbury met with such opposition from the
mine-owners, who feared that if child labour were made illegal they
would not have sufficient 'hands' to work the mines and that they
would have to pay higher wages.

The Act of 1842 forbade altogether the employment of women and girls
in the mines, and allowed only boys of the age of ten or more to do
such work. The Poor Law Guardians of the time used to send children
into the mines at the age of seven as a means of finding employment
for them. The hours of work were limited to ten daily and fifty-eight
each week.

Little or no attempt was made in the Bill to give children the means
of obtaining a good education, although considerably more than half
the children in the country never went to school at all, and many
large towns were without a proper school.

By a previous Factory Act of 1834 all children under fourteen years
of age were compelled to attend school for two hours daily. The
employer was allowed to deduct one penny a week from the child's wages
to pay the teacher. This proved absolutely useless, as the masters
employed worn-out workers as teachers, and in consequence the
children learnt nothing at all.

It was not until the year 1870 that a Bill was passed in Parliament
to create an adequate number of public elementary schools for every
district in the kingdom. To show the increase in the number of schools
built, there were in the year 1854, 3825, and in the year 1885,
21,976.

But the children of England owe almost as much to Charles Dickens
as they do to Lord Shaftesbury. He was almost the first, and certainly
the greatest, writer who, with a heart overflowing with sympathy for
little children, has left us in his books a gallery of portraits which
no one can ever forget.

He himself, "a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of
boy," passed through a time of bitter poverty, and his stay at school,
short as it was, was not a period of his life upon which he looked
back with any pleasure.

The material for his books was drawn from life--from his own and from
the lives of those around him--and for this reason all that he wrote
will always be of great value, as it gives us a good ide