industry are to be found employed children of 2 and 212 years.”[1]
Where lace-making ends in the counties of Buckingham and Bedford, straw-plaiting begins, and extends over a large part of Hertfordshire and the westerly and northerly parts of Essex. In 1861, there were 40,043 persons employed in straw-plaiting and straw-hat making; of these 3815 were males of all ages, the rest females, of whom 14,913, including about 7000 children, were under 20 years of age. In the place of the lace-schools we find here the “straw-plait schools.” The children commence their instruction in straw-plaiting generally in their 4th, often between their 3rd and 4th year. Education, of course, they get none. The children themselves call the elementary schools, “natural schools,” to distinguish them from these blood-sucking institutions, in which they are kept at work simply to get through the task, generally 30 yards daily, prescribed by their half-starved mothers. These same mothers often make them work at home, after school is over, till 10, 11, and 12 o’clock at night. The straw cuts their mouths, with which they constantly moisten it, and their fingers. Dr, Ballard gives it as the general opinion of the whole body of medical officers in London, that 300 cubic feet is the minimum space proper for each person in a bedroom or work-room. But in the straw-plait schools space is more sparingly allotted than in the lace-schools, “1223, 17, 1812 and below 22 cubic feet for each person.” The smaller of these numbers, says one of the commissioners, Mr. White, represents less space than the half of what a child would occupy if packed in a box measuring 3 feet in each direction. Thus do the children enjoy life till the age of 12 or 14. The wretched half-starved parents think of nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children. The latter, as soon as they are grown up, do not care a farthing, and naturally so, for their parents, and leave them. “It is no wonder that ignorance and vice abound in a population so brought up.… Their morality is at the lowest ebb,… a great number of the women have il-
- ↑ l. c., pp. xxix., xxx.
