start if it is steady wet; but when once out, the
master does not like to send them back. They
have gone out, and have had it come on wet as
soon as they got to the place, and been dangling
about all day on the chance of its being fine,
yet got nothing. For a quarter of a day, those
that get fivepence a day get one penny farthing,
and the threepenny ones get a halfpenny. That
ain't much to get wet for, is it?" In spite,
however, of the figures quoted, the aggregate
earnings of the gangs are very considerable. In one
parish alone one thousand pounds a year is paid
to the gang-masters; in another, the daily wages
paid to gangs by three employers amounts to
seven hundred and forty pounds a year. One
gang-master on the borders of Norfolk and
Cambridge has paid from fourteen pounds to
seventeen pounds a week in wages.

If we wish for evidence of the effect of gang-
work upon the physical condition of those
employed, we find it in the sixth report of the
medical officer of the Privy Council, who
says:

"In some entirely rural marsh districts the
habitual mortality of young children is almost
as great as in the most infanticidal of our
manufacturing towns; that Wisbeach, for instance,
is within a fraction as bad as Manchester; and
that generally in the registration districts of
eighteen others (which include several in which
the gang-system prevails, the death-rate of
infants under one year of age is from two and a
quarter to nearly three times as high as in the
sixteen districts of England which have the
lowest infantile mortality." (Sixth Report, p. 33.)

"The result of this new inquiry, however,
has been to show that the monstrous infantine
rate of the examined agricultural districts
depends only on the fact that there has been
introduced into these districts the influence which
has already been recognised as enormously fatal
to the infants of manufacturing populations—
the influence of the employment of adult women."

"The opinions of about seventy medical
practitioners, with those of other gentlemen
acquainted with the condition of the poor, were
obtained. With wonderful accord the cause of
the mortality was traced by nearly all these
well-qualified witnesses to the bringing of the
land under tillage; that is to the cause which
has banished malaria, and has substituted a
fertile though unsightly garden for the winter
marshes and summer pastures of fifty and one
hundred years ago. It was very generally
thought that the infants no longer received any
injury from soil, climate, or malarious influences,
but that a more fatal enemy had been introduced
by the employment of the mothers in the
field."

We read, too, of girls at an age which a
medical witness describes as especially delicate,
ill fed, shod, and clothed, standing up to
their waists in the wet crops; of deaths from
diphtheria arising from over-exposure; of a child
who "was a corpse from going in the turnips;"
of strains from carrying heavy loads of roots
and stones; of blistered feet and bleeding
hands. Flax-pulling cuts the flesh terribly; and
in winter the tops of many weeds are frequently
"full of ice."

Passing from the physical to the moral evils
of this atrocious system, the testimony becomes
overwhelmingly conclusive. It takes the young
away from good influences, and exposes them to
bad. It makes education impossible, and
converts girls into demons whose talk and
gestures make it impossible for "a respectable
person to venture to speak to, scarcely
to look at them, without the risk of being
shocked."

In a small parish in which it is said that
many children are employed in agricultural work
besides those in a gang, and that the demand
for them and women is increasing, the incumbent
states:

"The consequence of the demand for children's
labour is, that it is scarcely possible to
keep children at school beyond eight years old,
and with a population of four hundred, and a
school in winter of more than forty scholars, I
had yesterday (May 1) only eighteen, and those
little more than infants, and I shall be as deficient
for at least two months more. There are,
however, more children absent with their parents
than in the gang."

Speaking of his own parish, in which children,
some very young, are employed in gangs,
the Reverend T. Hutton remarks that "education
has been within the reach of the poor for the
last fifty years," and that there is now, and has
been for years, every educational advantage,
"and all for one penny a week;" and yet "the
number of men who signed the marriage register
with marks the last ten years was only four
per cent less than it was a hundred years ago."
He further refers to the well-known fact as to
the superior state of education in America, and
states that to a question lately put by him to an
American gentleman of long experience as to
the per-centage of persons in the New England
States unable to read, the answer was: "No
per-centage at all."

Of the ways in which our white slaves are
housed, we read: They live like pigs; great
boys and girls, mothers and fathers, all sleeping
in one room in many instances; and a policeman,
writing of the gross immorality of the
young girls, says: "Their boldness and shamelessness
I never saw equalled during some years
of police life and detective duty in the worst
parts of London." Nor is this wonderful when
the character of their masters and mistresses is
considered. One old gang-master of seventy-
two is convicted of an indecent assault upon a
girl of thirteen, who worked under him; and
the member of parliament who forwards the
particulars, adds: "I am afraid such cases
would come oftener before the magistrates if
the children dared to speak." A woman acting
as manager of a gang for her husband was
convicted of stealing potatoes, "she making
the children instruments of the felony, and they
concealed the potatoes in their dinner-baskets."