Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/19

 noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance. 700 are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the Act. Now, it should be observed that, of the whole number of accidents in three years, 128 had occurred from shafts; that is about 42 in a year. Of the 128, 35 resulted in death, or a fraction above 11 in a year. In other words, the number of persons affected by the factory law being from 500,000 to 600,000, the proportion injured in any way by accident from this cause is (assuming the lowest number of people) about one in 12,000; and the proportion of deaths among them is about one in 45,000. This is the proportion on the showing of the Inspectors; and those who care to institute a comparison between the danger of this and other modes of occupation will find that in no other is the proportion of deaths so small. Coroners' returns have been examined with this view, and the results are very interesting; but we are not concerned with them here. We need only say, in illustration of the spirit of the Inspectors' reports and of Lord Palmerston's proceedings, that the coroners' reports show that, in the factory districts, the fatal accidents from carts and other agencies concerned in labour were 79 to 29 in factories; and of the factory accidents, not five per cent are owing to machinery. In the year preceding that in which the Inspectors made their appeal to Lord Palmerston, there were 12 deaths from factory machinery in the whole kingdom; whereas the deaths from other accidents, in Manchester alone, were 531. By as near a computation as can be made in the imperfect state of our statistics, the number of fatal accidents in the United Kingdom averages about 5,000, of which 12 are cases of mill accidents from all kinds of factory machinery. These particulars will show how ill authorised is the Inspectors' representation of the "enormous amount" of accidents in factories; but otherwise they are of no