When Lord Ashley's Commission reported, in 1842, five thousand females were at work, more than a thousand feet below the soil, in the coal-mines of the north of England. These women were nearly naked, and drew trucks, in harness, on all-fours, like beasts of burden. You cannot have forgotten the remarkable description of such women in D'Israeli's novel of "The Sibyl."
"They come forth. The plain is covered with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth, alas! of both sexes, though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference. All are clad in male attire, and oaths that men might shudder to hear issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be, some are, the mothers of England! Can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language, when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs, clad in canvas; while, on hands and feet, an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen, hours a day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal along subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy." These women, called free, were the wretched slaves of capital. In the life of Stephenson, the railway engineer, you will find a further account of them, and may read the chilling answer given by a woman whom he asked if she had ever heard of Jesus, "that no such hand had ever worked in her shaft!" Let the proprietors of English mines remember! No such hand did ever work in those shafts, yet they called themselves Christian men! True as death were the words. If the law is now free of reproach, the evil has by no means ceased to exist: the Master still stands knocking.
"Children," wrote Lord Ashley, "are taken to work when only four years old, girls as well as boys. Dragging the coal carriages requires the whole strength of either sex. Young men and women, married women and married men, work together through the same number of hours, almost, sometimes quite, naked, constantly demoralizing each other. It stints their growth and cripples their limbs." In the east of Scotland, they still toil up steep ladders from the shafts.
If it were my purpose to show you moral degradation, you could hardly bear what I must say; but I desire only, at this moment, to show you these men and women working, as Sydney Smith would say, in the dirt together. In 1842, the Earl of Durham knew of this; and he and the set with whom he lived dared, doubtless, to whisper to the ladies in their halls, that women were not made to labor!
In the calico-mills, girls grind and mix the colors. They are called teerers. They begin at five years of age, and labor twelve hours a day, sometimes sixteen; and are kept late into the night to prepare for the following day.
In Sedgely and Warrington, the fate of the female pinmakers is no better. They begin at five years of age, and work from twelve to sixteen hours a day. If refractory, they are struck at Wiltenhall with strap, stick, hammer, or file, in spite of the delicacy of the sex. In Sedgely, more women are employed than men; but they do not fare any better: their bodies are seamed by blows given with bars of burning iron.
O my sisters! why has God sheltered us in quiet homes? What have we done to deserve a happier fate? Why were we not left to writhe beneath the blows of the smith, or the outrage of a market-sale?
Because God has laid down a responsibility by the side of every privilege, and requires us to labor not merely to set such women free, but to establish a freedom and security by law,—the law of custom as well as the law of courts, which we only possess through usurpation or indulgence.
I will not leave these English shores without alluding to the physical strength shown by that lovely paralytic, Anna Gurney. Deprived of the use of her limbs in very early life, she acquired the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and finally the Teutonic tongues, with a facility and thoroughness that her Anglo-Saxon translations show. Men might be excused if they sheltered from contact with the world this infirm creature, dependent upon artificial aid for every movement; but what did she choose for herself?
In 1825, after her mother's death, she went to live at Northrepps. At her own expense, she procured one of Manby's apparatus for saving the lives of seamen cast upon that dangerous coast; and, in cases of great urgency and peril, she caused herself to be carried down to the beach, and, from the sick chair which she wheeled over the sand, directed every movement for the rescue and recovery of the half-drowned men.