A spinner says:
"I find it difficult to keep my piecers awake the last hours of a winter's evening; have seen them fall asleep, and go on performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the billey had stopped, when their work was over; I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening when they were fast asleep, when there was no work to do, and they were doing nothing; children at night are so fatigued that they are asleep often as soon as they sit down, so that it is impossible to wake them to sense enough to wash themselves, or even to eat a bit of supper, being so stupid in sleep."
In alluding to the cruelty of parents, who suffer their children to be overworked in factories for their own gain, as spoken of in the Report of the Board of Health in Manchester, and above-quoted, the Commissioners say that
"It is not wholly unknown in the West Riding of Yorkshire for parents to carry their children to the mills in the morning on their backs, and to carry them back again at night."
And, further, that
"It appears in evidence that sometimes the sole consideration by which parents are influenced in making choice of a person under whom to place their children, is the amount of wages, not the mode of treatment, to be secured to them."
If this is not enough to show that there were grounds for the further protection, I will now refer to the same Report of the Commissioners, to show, that from Scotland the details are full as affecting, and even more disgusting. At page 18 (Report) the Commissioners open with these words:
"Had the fact not been established by indubitable evidence, everyone must have been slow to credit, that in this age and country the proprietors of extensive factories could have been indifferent to the well-being of their work-people to such a degree as is implied in the following statements":
In page 41 an half-overseer gives this evidence:
"Does not like the long hours; he is very tired and hoarse at night; and that some of the young female workers in his, the spinning flat, have so swelled legs, one in particular, from standing so long, about seventeen years old, that she can hardly walk; that various of them have their feet bent in and their legs crooked from the same cause."