If the employment of boys in such a way be, as a miner said to the commissioners, "barbarity, barbarity," what are we to think of the slavery of female children in the same abyss of darkness? How shall we express our feelings upon learning that females, in the years of opening womanhood, are engaged in the same occupations as their male companions, in circumstances repugnant to the crudest sense of decency? Yet we have unimpeachable evidence that, at the time of the investigations of the commissioners, females were thus employed; and there is reason to believe that this is still the case.
COAL GETTER.
The commissioners found females employed like the males in the labours of the mines in districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, in the East of Scotland, and in Wales. In great numbers of the pits visited, the men were working in a state of entire nakedness, and were assisted by females of all ages, from girls of six years old to women of twenty-one—these females being themselves quite naked down to the waist. Mr. Thomas Pearce says that in the West Riding of Yorkshire—
"The girls hurry with a belt and chain, as well as thrust. There are as many girls as boys employed about here. One of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen, was that of young females, dressed like boys in trousers, crawling on all fours, with belts around their waists and chains passing between their legs, at day-pits at Thurshelf Bank, and in many small pits near Holmfirth and New Mills. It exists also in several other places."
In the neighbourhood of Halifax, it is stated that there is no distinction whatever between the boys and girls in their coming up the shaft and going down; in their mode of hurrying or thrusting; in the weight of corves; in the distance they are hurried; in wages or dress; that the girls associate and labour with men who are in a state of nakedness, and that they have themselves no other garment than a ragged shift, or, in the absence of that, a pair of broken trousers, to cover their persons.
Here are specimens of the evidence taken by the commissioners:—
"Susan Pitchforth, aged eleven, Elland: 'I have worked in this pit going two years. I have one sister going of fourteen, and she works with me in the pit. I am a thruster.'
"'This child,' said the sub-commissioner, 'stood shivering before me from cold. The rags that hung about her waist were once called a shift, which was as black as the coal she thrust, and saturated with water—the drippings of the roof and shaft. During my examination of her, the banksman, whom I had left in the pit, came to the public-house and wanted to take her away, because, as he expressed himself, it was not decent that she should be exposed to us.'