Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/47

 The papers we refer to are contained in "Household Words" for April 14th, May 12th, June 23rd, and July 28th, 1855. There would be no occasion, if our space allowed, to exhibit all the unscrupulous statements, and objectionable representations which are crowded into the few pages involved. A very few citations will sustain our rebuke. The society of mill-occupiers is entitled, by Mr. Dickens or his contributor (p. 495), "The National Association for the Protection of the Eight to Mangle Operatives." He uses the opportunities of the subject in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,—vividly describing the crushing of bones and the rending of flesh, and the tearing of joints out of their sockets, carrying this method so far as to speak of the members of the Association as "men not squeamish about a few spots of spilt brain, or a leg or an arm more or less upon a poor man's body." (Page 337.) Mr. Dickens, or his contributor, proceeds throughout on the assumption that the law orders the casing of the shafts, while he takes no notice of this being the very point in dispute; nor yet of the professional evidence as to the clanger of both casings and hooks: nor of the objections of the workers to the hooks which caused, at least in certain specified cases, their removal. He makes the extraordinary statement (p. 495) that "these deadly shafts" "mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures:" and, considering the magnitude of this exaggeration (our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per year), it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures, when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers produce facts in answer to romance about the numbers concerned, he presents them as reading out of "Death's cyphering book," and proceeds to beg the question, as usual, in such language as this:—"As for ourselves, we admit freely that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised or savage;" this "justification" being a quoting of the coroners' returns, by