every year — that he has to spend in order to get a dwelling, in most cases unhealthy and far too small; and this dwelling will never be his own, even though at the age of forty-five or fifty he is sure to be sent away from the factory, because the work that he used to do will by that time be accom plished by a machine and a child.
We all know that the child ought, at least, to be familiarised with the forces of Nature which some day he will have to utilise; that he ought to be prepared to keep pace in his life with the steady progress of science and technics; that he ought to study science and learn a trade. Every-one will grant thus much; but what do we do? From the age of ten or even nine we send the child to push a coal-cart in a mine, or to bind, with a little monkey’s agility, the two ends of threads broken in a spinning gin. From the age of thirteen we compel the girl — a child yet — to work as a “woman” at the weaving-loom, or to stew in the poisoned, over-heated air of a cotton-dressing factory, or, perhaps, to be poisoned in the death chambers of a Staffordshire pottery. As to those who have the relatively rare luck of receiving some more education, we crush their minds by useless overtime, we con sciously deprive them of all possibility of them selves becoming producers; and under an educational system of which the motive is “profits,” and the means “specialisation,” we simply work to death the women teachers who take their educational duties in earnest. What floods of use]ess sufferings deluge every so-called civilised land in the world!
When we look back on ages past, and see there the same sufferings, we may say that perhaps then they were unavoidable on account of the ignorance which prevailed. But human genius, stimulated by our modern Renaissance, has already indicated new paths to follow.
For thousands of years in succession to grow one’s food was the burden, almost the curse, of mankind. But it need be so no more. If you make yourselves the soil, and partly the temperature and the moisture which