Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/25

 said—when serving, as the Rev. J. Fraser, in the Royal Commission on the employment of children, young persons, and women in agriculture—"fearful to contemplate." "Modesty," he goes on, "must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where, in one small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up girls—two and sometimes three generations—are herded promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and of nature—dressings, undressings, births, deaths—is performed by each within the sight or hearing of all; where children of both sexes, to as high an age as twelve or fourteen, or even more, occupy the same bed; where the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine."

The too early putting of the children to work is one of the consequences of over-large families. In the country the children working in gangs in the fields learn evil speech and evil act at an age when they should be innocent, at school and at play. In town, in the factory and in the workroom, the seeds of disease are sown in the child-labourers. "Children in big families," says Dr. Drysdale, "are taken out to work very early, and premature exertion often injures them for life. . . Children are not fit to do very much work so long as they are half developed, and early death is often the consequence." Children should not work for their bread; the frame is not fit for toil, the brain is not ready for the effort of long attention; those who give the life should support and protect it until the tenderness of childhood is passed away, and the young body is firm-knit and strong, prepared to take its share of the battle, and bear the burden and heat of the day.

From the same pressure and struggle for existence, consequent on the difficulty of winning the means of life in an over-crowded land, arise the unhealthy conditions among which many kinds of work are carried on. Mr. Godwin remarks, as to artificial flower-making: "In an upper room in Oxford Street, not ten feet square, I have seen a dozen delicate young women closely shut up, pursuing this occupation. . . . . Many of the workrooms of fashionable milliners are similarly over-crowded, as are those where young girls are engaged in book-stitching. Take, as an example, a house in Fleet Street, looked at not long ago. The passage is narrow; a door in it shuts with a spring; the staircase is