Lord Shaftesbury's "Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act" (1864) provided that a chimney sweeper convicted of causing or allowing any person under the age of twenty-one to ascend or descend a chimney or enter a flue for the purpose of sweeping it or extinguishing a fire might be sent to prison for a term not exceeding six months with or without hard labour. But master chimney sweeps still continued to "snap their sooty fingers at the law." In the issue of March 2, 1867, Punch reproduces the following business "card": —

"William Burges, Chimney Sweeper, No. 36 Bolton Street, Chorley, flatters himself with having boys of the best size for such branch of business suitable for a Tunnel or Chimney, and that it is now in his power to render his assistance in a more extensive manner than he usually has done. He also carries his boys from room to room occasionally, to prevent them staining or marking any room floor with their feet."

In short, there was good ground for the complaint that while a great deal had been said about our working men, but little notice had been taken of our working children. A discussion of the "half-time system" at a working men's club in which another enlightened and benevolent peer, Lord Lyttelton, took part, is accordingly welcomed as sensible and opportune: —

"By this system," said Lord Lyttelton, "which compelled every parent who chose to send his child to work also to send him or her half the day to school, a very useful compromise had been effected between the demands of labour and education… This system, as carried out in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, had resulted in the increased education, and consequent improved life and conduct, of their inhabitants, as had been manifested during the late cotton famine, and in many other ways."

Gentlemen of England who live at home at ease perhaps have little notion of how hard some children work, and how needful it appears to make some effort to relieve them. From a Blue-Book he produced at the meeting we have mentioned, Lord Lyttelton

"Gave an instance of a little girl engaged in a brickyard near Birmingham from 6 a. m. to 8 p. m., only having fifteen minutes for breakfast, and thirty minutes for dinner, no time for tea, and during one day she would have to catch and throw to her neighbour fifteen tons of bricks."

What a mercy it would be to such poor little working children if their fathers were compelled to send them every day to school!

White Slaves in the Black Country

Towards the end of the same year the Town Council of Sheffield met to consider the report of the Children's Employment Commission relative to the overworking of children in the trades of that town: —

According to that Report, a boy, only nine years old, living at Wadsley, four or five miles from Sheffield, was obliged by his father to work as cellar-boy in one of the furnaces, on most days of the week from six in the morning to six or seven in the evening, and on Saturdays from three in the morning till three in the afternoon. This enforced labour at a high temperature would, if only occasional, appear to be equivalent to a somewhat long compulsory innings in the Turkish bath. Imposed nearly every day, it may be considered by some who do not consider too deeply, to constitute a combination of the Turkish bath with Turkish tyranny, and tyranny about as barbarous as ever was practised in Turkey.

The "Good Parson" (to applicant for instruction in the Night School): "Have you been confirmed, my boy?"

Boy (hesitating): "Please, sir – I – don't know."

Parson: "You understand me; has the Bishop laid his hands on you?"

Boy: "Oh, no, sir, but his Keeper have, sir – very often, sir!"

Naturally, such outspoken comments gave offence, and in 1866 and again in 1868 Punch was very much in the black books of the Black Country for what he said on the state of morals, manners and education among the workers of that region of coal and iron. The controversy began with some lines, "The Queen in the Black Country," which were inspired by the inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at Wolverhampton. These gave pain to certain susceptible inhabitants of that town. Punch's reply was to quote from the report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1864 on the trades in the Wolverhampton district, showing that all the large employers lived far away from the workpeople they employed; that a few ministers of religion were almost the only representatives of the upper class resident in the "Black Country"; that large numbers of children, youths, young persons and women worked the same long hours as the men, from 6 or 7 a. m. to 9, 10 and 11 p. m.; that among them little girls were often kept bellows-blowing fourteen hours a day.

Laws to Protect Children

In January, 1868, Punch was accused of being a Rip Van Winkle, who had been asleep for half a century, because when Bishop Selwyn was translated from New Zealand to Lichfield he had published some verses ending up with the question, "What's the savage o'er sea to the savage at home?" His answer was to say that he wished he could, like Rip Van Winkle, fall asleep not over the Black Country only, but over every manufacturing district of England, to wake in fifty years and find education for ignorance, thrift and comfort for improvidence and squalor, gentleness and refinement for coarseness and brutality among men and women; health and happiness for sickliness and suffering, premature decrepitude and deadening of mind among children. But the facts were too strong for him: —

We never said, or meant to say, that things were as bad in the Black Country now as they were fifty, forty, or twenty years ago. We are quite ready to believe, with a more courteous and kindly Black Country correspondent than Mr. Lawley, that much has been done, and that much is doing, for religion, education and civilization in that region as everywhere else.

If Mr. Punch has been unfair to the Black Country, he has, at least, been sinning in good company. Hear what Mr. Justice Keating spoke from the Bench, in a Black Country case, not three weeks ago: —

"I cannot help noticing the most deplorable state of matters shown by the evidence of these girls. We call ourselves a Christian people and pride ourselves upon being a civilized nation. These two girls have said that they could neither read nor write; that they had never in their lives been at school, church or chapel; that they had never heard of the Bible; and, as the learned counsel had suggested, in all probability they had never heard of a Divine Being. We send out missionaries to the heathen, but what avails all this when we see such a state of things at home?"

The introduction of the Metalliferous Mines Bill in the Lords in July, 1872, prompted Punch to express his ironic satisfaction: —

Would you be surprised to hear that we already protect women and children to this extraordinary extent? No children under 15 are sent down into the mines, and women are not worked more than twelve hours, and – will you believe it? – not at all on Sundays.

In the same month the Lords read a second time the Bill for protecting children against those who cruelly train them to become acrobats. There is hardly a single mention throughout all these years of efforts to secure humane treatment for working children in which the honoured name of Lord Shaftesbury is not prominent, as it was in this debate. There was, as Punch says, no sentimentality about this interference, and we ought not to leave children to be tortured for the delectation of the lower class of folks, well-dressed or not, who are pleased by unnatural acrobatic feats.

It gave Punch no pleasure to write sermons on Blue Books, least of all when the Blue Books only gave him the blues. He usually abstained from the discussion of merely painful subjects. But just indignation often forced him to make exceptions. Thirty years after the passage of the first, and nine after the passage of the second Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, a very bad case of evasion occurred in the North of England: —

We take this paragraph from the Pall Mall Gazette: —

"Chimney-sweeps, who continue, in defiance of the law, to employ 'climbing boys' may take warning from a case which has been tried at Durham. A Gateshead chimney-sweeper was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for the manslaughter of an unhappy little lad who was suffocated in attempting to carry out his orders in clearing a flue."

Apart from the individual ruffianism in this case, Mr. Punch asks whether the Act which was intended to deliver little children from the most hideous cruelties is becoming a dead letter in any part of the kingdom. Is there any other place than Gateshead where little lads are rammed into foul flues to be suffocated? The present generation may not remember the struggle that had to be fought out, over and over, before the children could be protected. It had to be waged against habit, prejudice, greed, ridicule; but the victory was won. James Montgomery,¹ the poet, with one ghastly but damaging volume, The Chimney Sweep's Magazine and Climbing Boy's Album, gave thousands a nightmare that lasted for years, but he carried the Act. There was a poem in the book, too, by Blake, the painter, that did yeoman's service. We got the Act, and believed that the system of atrocious cruelty was at an end. But the above paragraph wakes painful doubts.

We should call the sentence on the fellow who killed the child ridiculously mild, could anything ridiculous connect itself with such a theme. We wish that this master chimney-sweeper of Gateshead could have been sentenced to two years' imprisonment, varied by twenty sound lashes with the cat every quarter day, except the last, when he should have had fifty, as a parting testimonial of the public sense of his character.

A Child Heroine

This was written in the issue of March 15, 1873. Just a year later, at the close of the Ashanti campaign, an appeal was made, and not in vain, to Punch to recognize the heroism of another working child: —

A TEN-YEAR-OLD MARTYR

"Dear Mr. Punch,

"There will be a great deal of war-paint going round soon, in the shape of titles, honours, and decorations, official rewards for 'killing, slaying and burning.' Will you give a decoration to the little motherless girl of ten, Louisa Row,² who 'undertook the cooking' for her father, 'a labourer,' and his family, and died in the execution of her duty?

"She has not killed anyone, black or white, except herself; she has not burned anyone's huts, or anyone's villages – she has only burned herself. She will get no glory, unless you, with a stroke of your pen, will put one little star of honour upon her unknown grave.

"The Author of Olive Varcoe."

Will our correspondent accept this inscription for her poor little martyr's tombstone?

 
Duty's small Servant, without prize or praise,
How soon on thy hard life hath death come down!
Take this brief record of thy childish days —
Gold, tried with fire, makes the best Martyr's Crown.
 

Punch's record as the champion of the working children leaves little room for criticism. And we have seen in several of the extracts given above that his severest censures are directed against the employers of labour, the greed of gain, the worship of Mammon. But if he cannot be convicted of partiality to capital, he was not always fair to labour. Even in his most democratic days he showed a distrust of "delegates." The working man's grievances were admitted, but his salaried spokesmen, when they were drawn from his own order, were condemned, with very few exceptions, as untrustworthy mischief-makers. How acute this distrust had now become may be gathered from the acrimonious article which appears in 1861 under the heading "A Dig at the Delegates": —

A Delegate is generally a lazy, idle lout, who likes to sit and talk much better than to work; and who, considering himself as being "gifted with the gab," tries to foster small dissensions and causes of dispute, that he may have the pleasure of hearing himself prate about them. In other words, he is a drone that goes buzzing about the beer-shops, and living upon the honey that the working bees have toiled for. His business is to set a man against his master, and to keep afloat the Unions that tend to nurture Strikes, by giving men a false idea of their own strength, and underrating the resources and resistance of employers. Having duped the shallow-pated to elect him as their mouthpiece and being paid by them to lead a lazy life in looking to what he is pleased to call their interests, the Delegate grows fat on their starvation and their Strikes, and what is death to them becomes to him the means of life. Fancied grievances and most unreasonable demands the Delegate endeavours to encourage and support, for squabbling brings him into notice and his tongue into full play, and raises his importance in the pothouse-haunting world. A claim for ten hours' pay for only nine hours' work is just the sort of trade demand that a Delegate delights in; for he knows that its injustice must prevent its being listened to, and he will have the chance of swigging nightly, gratis, pots of beer while denouncing the iniquity of rapacious masters, in all the frothy eloquence of a public-house harangue.

As nobody but a fool would submit to have his earnings eaten into by a sloth, it is the business of the Delegate to clap a stop on cleverness, and keep the brains of working men down to the muddle-pated level of those who are his tools. He, of course, fears the quick sight of any workman of intelligence, lest it may see through his iniquitous designs. He, therefore, gets the best hands marked on the Black List, and does the utmost in his power to reduce the active, skilful and industrious working man to the standard of the stupid, slothful, sluggish sot.

Mrs. North: "You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course of action; I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable arrangement, I must put the case into other hands."

There have always been people who trade on discontent, and would find their occupation gone were it removed. But to represent such motives as animating the majority of Trade Union delegates was a gross exaggeration; and it was both unfair and unjust to draw so hard and fast a distinction between the rank and file of the working classes and those whom they chose to represent them. The weakness of Punch's position was severely tested during the war of North and South in America and the Lancashire cotton famine, of which that war was the cause. Just as Punch failed to recognize the existence of idealism in the leaders of the North, and consistently maligned and misrepresented Lincoln until his death, so he failed to render justice to the idealism of the cotton operatives, who espoused a cause which was not only unpopular and unfashionable, but the promotion of which entailed the maintenance of that blockade which caused widespread distress and misery in Lancashire. Punch's attitude towards America in the earlier stages of the conflict showed a complete inability to comprehend the great issues involved, and an impartial dislike of both sides tempered by a sentimental leaning towards the South. It must be remembered that at this time the cause of the South was favoured by nearly all classes, that it appealed to Mr. Gladstone; that the Duke of Argyll and John Bright were almost the only statesmen who backed the North; and that amongst London newspapers of any weight the Spectator stood almost alone on that side. Punch's