Note 151 — Chapter XIX

For sketches of women and children (with a chain between their legs) harnessed to coal wagons in the pits, see Parliamentary Papers, vol. xv, 1842. "There is a factory system grown up in England the most horrible that imagination can conceive," wrote Sir William Napier to Lady Hester Stanhope two years after Queen Victoria's accession. "They are hells where hundreds of children are killed yearly in protracted torture." In Torrens's Memoirs of the Queen's First Prime Minister, one reads: "Melbourne had a Bill drawn which with some difficulty he persuaded the Cabinet to sanction, prohibiting the employment of children under 9 in any except silk mills."