two million. The growth was chiefly in the North. Liverpool, Manchester, and Bradford sprang into sudden fame, contributing nearly 75 per cent, of the increase. The cause is not far to seek. The newly discovered power of steam had increased the manufactures and created a tremendous demand for coal. Hence a vast population grew up around the northern coalfields, and the most desolate parts of the island became alive with struggling humanity. There appeared to be work and wages for all, though later developments showed how totally inadequate those wages were. Boys and girls married early, and families were large at this time in all classes of society. The Queen herself had given birth to nine sons and six daughters, and it was no unusual thing to find fifteen and twenty children in a family—a rate which soon peopled our islands with astonishing rapidity!
There was little enough organisation ready to cope with the masses of children added to the population. Both in town and country the children of England at this time were the wildest morsels of humanity, plunged in ignorance, steeped in vice, only half clothed and half fed, and, moreover, in many parts of the country,
