to be upset from within, and it tends to display some incompetence in its domestic economy.
It was upon this organism, the family, that our industrial revolution fell, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with destructive force. The chief sufferer was the weakest unit of the family, that is, the child. Those who may doubt this should read that series of blue-books on the children of England, which, beginning with the report of 1817 on chimney-sweeps, may be said to have reached its climax in the report of 1867 on the abuse of children in agricultural gangs. That sequence of official documents is perhaps our most sensational literature.
Probably, however, the report and evidence issued in 1842 and 1843 by the Commission appointed to inquire into the physical and moral condition of the children and young persons employed in the mines and manufactures of this country, is on the whole the most representative and the most instructive of these documents. It appeared that an immense number of children had been drafted into industry. As regards mines, the Commissioners found that eight and nine was the ordinary age at which employment commenced, though it was frequently six and seven. Underground, girls and boys, young men and young women, and married women, worked mingled together, commonly almost naked and in the grossest degradation. The work as regards the children was mostly for twelve hours a day, while
