THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN.
A PENNY picture bearing this title used in our boyhood to be a favourite with children, and in great request for decorating the walls of cottages. It contained a number of strange delineations,— oxen roasting butchers, horses riding on men, children flogging their parents, &c. The factory-districts appear to be in a fair way of realizing these grotesque combinations of pictorial fancy. The Children's Employment Commission found mothers in and around Nottingham subsisting in ictleness upon the proceeds of their children's labour, many of whom were scarcely advanced beyond infancy. Sir CHARLES Spew, in his pamphlet on the Manufac- turing Districts,* speaks of men upon whom devolves the house- hold cares ; their wives and children finding employment in the fac- tories while the men cannot. Doubtless there are heartless mothers who are contented with the system which enables them to live upon the earnings of their little boys and girls, and selfish lazy rascals who can snore at home or speechify in clubs, well pleased to see the burden of supporting the family borne by their wives and in- fanta. But there are many upon whom this inversion of the order of nature is forced who cannot help themselves. Machinery can with the aid of comparatively few men accomplish all tasks that require strength; but where it is merely necessary to watch the working of a machine and knot a snapped thread occasionally, women can serve the turn as well ; for ducking under the ma- chinery, children alone can be employed. Lace and other light manufactures are better suited for the flexible fingers of children and women than of men. Female and juvenile workers are more economical than male adults. It is a necessary tendency of our factory system to diminish the demand for the labour of grown men and increase the demand for the labour of women and children. This arrangement would pay the masters better under any circumstances ; but in the headlong race between domestic and foreign competitors, the masters are driven to it whether they will or not. By the invention of machinery and the factory system, man has been enabled to multiply infinitely many articles in general demand ; but it threatens, like Midas's gift of making gold out of every thing, to remove all other objects of enjoy- ment and even subsistence from him, and to crush him beneath the accumulated mass cf that which he so much coveted. Our mills card and spin ourselves along with the cotton. The successors of the Frankensteins WATT, A RKWRIGHT, &c. are in the grasp of their "monster." The steam-engine has done what the philoso- pher of old could not do for want of a standing-place—" moved the world "; turned it upside down ; set its head where its heels should be.
• "Replies of Sir Charles Shaw to Lord Ashley, M.P., regarding the Edu- cation and Moral and Physical Condition of the Labouring Classes."
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