I now proceed, by a few examples, to illustrate the principles laid
 down above. As a matter of fact, the reader is already familiar with numerous
 instances given in the chapter on the working-day. In the hardware manufactures
 of Birmingham and the neighbourhood, there are employed, mostly in very
 heavy work, 30,000 children and young persons, besides 10,000 women. There
 they are to be seen in the unwholesome brass-foundries, button factories,
 enamelling, galvanising, and lackering works. [172]
 Owing to the excessive labour of their workpeople, both adult and non-adult,
 certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed, have got
 the ill-omened name of “slaughterhouses.” [173] Similar excesses are practised in book-binding, where the victims are chiefly women,
 girls, and children; young persons have to do heavy work in rope-walks
 and night-work in salt mines, candle manufactories, and chemical works;
 young people are worked to death at turning the looms in silk weaving,
 when it is not carried on by machinery. [174]436One of the most shameful, the most dirty, and the worst paid kinds of labour, and one on which women and young girls are by preference employed, is the
 sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain, apart from its own
 immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world.
 They flow in from Japan, from the most remote States of South America,
 and from the Canary Islands. But the chief sources of their supply are
 Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium, and Holland. They
 are used for manure, for making bedflocks, for shoddy, and they serve as
 the raw material of paper. The rag-sorters are the medium for the spread
 of small-pox and other infectious diseases, and they themselves are the
 first victims. [175] A classical example of over-work, of hard and inappropriate labour, and of its brutalising effects on the
 workman from his childhood upwards, is afforded not only by coal-mining
 and miners generally, but also by tile and brick making, in which industry
 the recently invented machinery is, in England, used only here and there.
 Between May and September the work lasts from 5 in the morning till 8 in
 the evening, and where the drying is done in the open air, it often lasts
 from 4 in the morning till 9 in the evening. Work from 5 in the morning
 till 7 in the evening is considered “reduced” and “moderate.” Both boys
 and girls of 6 and even of 4 years of age are employed. They work for the
 same number of hours, often longer, than the adults. The work is hard and
 the summer heat increases the exhaustion. In a certain tile-field at Mosley,
 e.g., a young woman, 24 years of age, was in the habit of making 2,000
 tiles a day, with the assistance of 2 little girls, who carried the clay
 for her, and stacked the tiles. These girls carried daily 10 tons up the
 slippery sides of the clay pits, from a depth of 30 feet, and then for
 a distance of 210 feet.