NEWS OF THE WEEK.
A NEW measure has been introduced to the Commons this week, with every prospect of being carried by acclamation—a bill to pre- vent the evils recently disclosed in the mines and collieries. This is a striking instance of the practical advantages of inquiry ; and the late Government, much as it was twitted with its commissions, is entitled to some share of approbation for the freedom and readi- ness with which it inquired into any thing and every thing. Some time ago there was an investigation into the employment of children in factories ; and it was discovered that mismanagement and mercenary brutality had gradually built up a system which was distorting and crippling the rising generation of our most im- portant districts. A law was passed to prevent the continuance of that evil. It was then .alleged that the condition of children in other employments was even worse ; and the exertions of Lord ASHLEY procured the appointment of the Children's Employment Commissioners. They have examined into the state of young persons en one branch of industry, mines and collieries ; and in the course of their inquiry they have disclosed more than the sufferings of the children alone, for they found the case of the women in many places no less pitiable. The frequent coincidence of great indi- -vidual wealth with national :,i4iress has been remarked as one of the characteristics of England : the Report of the Commissioners exposes, in conjunction with the highest civilization in the world, whole sections of the people sunk in the lowest barbarism. In some districts infants are condemned by their parents to perpetual labour, at a work—to call it beyond their strength is saying no- thing, for it dooms them to premature adolescence, disease, and misery ; it is so conducted that the infant is carried almost from the cradle to that moral degradation and physical suffer- ing in which he is to perish ; and it is performed in places so strait and noisome, and so perilous, that the very being in them is a fate from which brutes would be shielded. Familiarity with danger and misery, and seclusion from moral or civil control, foster in the grown men feelings of ferocity and recklessness, of which the defenceless children and women are the victims ; and the latter are driven from their domestic duties to bear intolerable loads. The child of the most refined civilization has rolled in his carriage, perchance reading, to beguile the way, of distant lands and savage races, over those murky labyrinths where the British troglodytes of the nineteenth century lead a life degraded by the traits of savage society, including the worst of all, the subjection of the female sex to the condition of a beast of burden. We knew all that is endured by the Indian squaw ; any child could tell you that the women of Polynesia perform the drudgery of life ; but it comes upon most of us with the effect of painful surprise, that a whole class .of the countrywomen of Queen VICTORIA undergo a more horrible and degraded fate than any which savage life entails upon the sex. Existence in some of the mines appears to differ from that of savages chiefly in that it is buried from the sun and air, and that the toil never ends. Here is a field for the exercise of the super- abundant corporate philanthropy of Great Britain ! Societies for the emancipation—ay, even of Blacks—need not seek for objects of sympathy in distant quarters of the globe : they have them here, under their very feet. To know these things, and not to begin a change at once, were scarcely possible; and Lord ASHLEY'S bill will instantly extinguish the most hideous evils. It will totally prohibit the employment of females in the mines and collieries ; boys under thirteen years of age will be excluded ; the cancelling of existing apprenticeship- indentures, and the forbidding of all such apprenticeship for the future, will emancipate a class of White slaves; and children will no longer be intrusted with the duties of engineer ! —a practice which produces some of the most wholesale disasters and recklessness of the present system. To this measure little ob- jection is hinted. Something is said about the limitation of age for boys ; for it is supposed that they cannot after twelve years of age contract "the peculiar bend of the back" which befits a collier—grown men, it might be said, do not cripple so readily as
infants! The instant withdrawal of all female labour does not appear to cause any apprehension on economical grounds. Counting on the endurance of their helpless dependents, the men lead a very. irregular life, alternating fits of debauchery with fits of industry deprive them of the aid which they now exact from the feeble, and they must divide among themselves that work which will not be altogether superseded by improvements in the mines; and it seems to have been found, in practical experiments, that the families are no poorer, and of course incalculably' happier, where
the women are excluded from the mines and left to their domestic duties above ground. It is :very seldom that a measure receives such approval from all sections of Oppositionists and Ministerialists as Lord ASHLEY'S bill.
There have been more of the bribery discussions. The issue of the writ for Newcastle was contested, but ineffectually ; the House not being quite clear that " head-money " is bribery : it was not 'pronounced not to be bribery, but the House is very jealous of ex- tending that unpleasant epithet ; and so Newcastle may go on elect- ing Members, using its own discretion as to the safety of taking " head-money." Belfast has been the subject of a very stirring history. The sitting Members, Mr. EMERSON TENNENT and Mr. WILLIAM GILLMAN JOHNSON, have abstained from defending their seats, which they acknowledged to be void on, purely technical grounds, the petitioners against the return not pressing the graver charges: and it is alleged that there has been a compromise—a Liberal being admitted by the Tories to one seat, while a Tory, Mr. EMERSON TENNENT to wit, escapes disqualification for the other. By some unusual mismanagement, a bribee (to borrow Mr. C. BULLER'S term) was suffered to come to London in the hope of a place, which Mr. TENNENT had it not to give the man ; and in a St of indignation because he had not received more than the stipu- lated bribe to repay him for his lost character, he emulates Joists WREN and promises disclosures. The difference between the two appears to be, that-WREN was not sufficiently unscrupulous for his party, and that CROPPER'S party was not sufficiently lavish for him.
To make some reform in' these scandals, Lord JOHN RUSSELL has introduced his bill—a bill for the better " discovery" of bribery ! There is an amusing naivete in the title, characteristic of the author ; as though bribery were a thing only to be disco- vered by some enterprising explorer. On examination, however, the bill is not found to proceed on the assumption that bribery is very recondite ; but the obstacle is, that the persons charged with its discovery have the peculiar gift of being able to shut their eyes to it : the bribery is as glaring as the sun at noon-day, but Com- mittees are blind ; hence the necessity for Lord JoHN's bill. It does not make any great progress in the enterprise. It provides for bringing evidence of bribery more completely before Commit- tees ; it protects witnesses from the consequence of giving evidence ; it disqualifies bribers from again employing the vote they have been convicted of prostituting ; and it devises a plan for convicting con- stituencies and bringing them to condign punishment,—but the last in so clumsy a way as to be probably inoperative. It does not remove the trial of bribery from a tribunal in which bribers have remove the trial of briberyfrom a tribunal in which bribers have an active share and influence ; it does not, of course, apply to the general Englishmen ; it makes no approach towards rectifying that inherent vice of the constituent body, which was rendered worse when the Reform Act added to it a large portion of the most bribable class in the country, the least educated portion of the middle class- The value of the bill was partly tested by the readiness with which the House of Commons admitted it—the House of Commons which is so tolerant of " head-money," which comprises confessed bribers and a large proportion of suspected ones, and whose Members re- fused to qualify themselves for Mr. ROEBUCK'S Committee by de- claring that they had never been involved in bribery. It is at least a harmless bill.
The Tariff goes on, not very rapidly; and on Tuesday evening honourable Members amused themselves with keepinF up a riot, that was begun by one of Mr. FERRAND'S foolish Imputations; which gave an opportunity to gentlemen to display a good deal of "manliness" and a good deal of silliness.
