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ciled him to his loss. One of his neighbours had dreamed that this beloved daughter was remarried and in great prosperity. He himself had dreamed that his forefathers had sent for his daughter and were overjoyed at receiving her. Other circumstances had occurred of a soothing nature: the shroud in Mahomedan countries is tied at the head, and when the body is deposited in the earth it is opened, that the relatives may take the last look and turn the head towards Mecca; in the case of this young woman, it was found that the face was already turned in the right direction. The priest who had been reading the Koran over the grave had fallen asleep, and dreamed that the deceased had declared herself overjoyed at the happy change. I found that the narrative of all these circumstances received the most serious attention, and thus, dreams and omens working on the father's mind, had yielded him consolation: and why should we deny peace of mind to an afflicted parent by seeking to destroy their effect?

Here are darker spots: they occur in oriental despotism:

66

The Rohanees described the King of Bokhara as having become tyrannous and headstrong: he had degraded his minister, the Koosh Begee, and had refused the Hindoos leave to burn their dead, because on being asked their creed, they had said they were Ibrahamees," or followers of Abraham. He had also, without any show of reason, caused all Mahomedans trading with Hindoo partners to be doubly taxed. Having discovered an intrigue between a baker's daughter and a Hindoo, he ordered both parties to be baked in the oven, although in his own person he held out the worst possible example to his subjects. It is, however, to be doubted if he is altogether in his senses. His acts of tyranny are so audacious and so numerous, that I have never ceased to congratulate myself at having passed so successfully through his kingdom. In espionage he appears even to surpass the Chinese. From these men I received an account of the horrid dungeons in Bokhara, known by the title of "Kuna-Khanu:" Kuna being the name of the creatures which attach themselves to dogs and sheep, (Anglice, ticks,) and which here thrive on the unhappy human beings who are cast in among them. The dungeons abound also in scorpions, fleas, and all kinds of vermin; and if human subjects happen to be deficient, goats or the entrails of animals are thrown in to feed them; so that the smell alone is in the highest degree noxious. One day suffices to kill any criminal which is cast into these horrid dens, and a confinement of a few hours leaves marks which are never effaced in after-life. The situation of the dungeons is below the ark or citadel in which the King resides.

Persian scimitars :

Some very fine blades were sent to us for our inspection by a decayed widow lady, whose husband had been one of the former Duranee lords. One of these scimitars was valued at five thousand rupees, and the other two at fifteen hundred each. The first of these was an Ispahan sword, made by one Zaman, the pupil of Asad, and a slave of Abbas the Great. It was formed of what is called "Akbaree steel," and had belonged to Ghoolam Shah Calora of Sinde, whose name was upon it, and was brought

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from that country during the wars of Mudad Khan. The especial cause of its great value was that the water could be traced upon it, like a skein of silk down the entire length of the blade. Had this watering been interrupted by a curve or cross, the sword would have been comparatively valueless. The second was also a Persian sword of the water called "Begumee. The lines did not run down straight, but waved like a watered silk fabric. It had the name of Nadir Shah on it. The third was what is termed a "Kara" (black) Khorasan blade, of the water named “ Bidr," and came from Casveen. There were neither straight nor waving lines in it, but it was mottled with dark spots. All these swords were light and well-balanced; the most valuable one was the most curved; the steel in all the three tingled like a bell, and is said to improve by age. One test of the genuineness of a sword is that it can be written upon with gold; others, more certain, are its cutting through a large bone, and severing a silk handkerchief when thrown into the air.

Our last extract of all brings us to a character nearer home, and is as descriptive of a nation, or at least of a class, as any we have met with:

At Bhawlpoor we heard of an European being in a caravanserai, and immediately sent him an invitation to join us. He proved to be Monsieur Benoir Argoud, Capitaine d'Infanterie, who had arrived here from Lahore: he was a red-hot Republican; and after we had risen from table, the good things of which had a little overtaken him, continued half the night shouting out "Liberty! Equality! and Saint Simonianism!" Early the next morning he broke into my apartment and exclaimed, "that it was seven o'clock, and that I must instantly rise, as the battle of Wagram had been fought, and his father killed at it, before that hour!" To crown all, Monsieur announced himself to be en route for Cabool to join Dost Mahomed Khan and constrain him to raise the green shirt of the Prophet, and attack these canaille, the Sikhs; being determined, as a preliminary part of his plan, to plant potatoes for the subsistence of the troops. We concluded Monsieur to be mad; but, as Fanny Kemble says of the Americans, “it might be otherwise;" and the question of "How comed you so?" would in this instance also have led to the explanation of the whole affair. Monsieur Argoud, too, had method in his madness; for he made out his journey safely to Cabool by the Bolan Pass and Candahar-not a very easy thing; and afterwards, when I had the honour of again meeting him, he told me that he had "saved himself from death, with the sword over his head!" by ejaculating the Mahomedan "Kuluma," or creed, of there being but one God and that Mahomed was his prophet.

171

ART. III.-Children's Employment Commission. First Report of the Commissioners. Presented by Her Majesty's Command to both Houses of Parliament.

IN this Christian land, whence benevolence and bounty not only flow but impetuously rush, even to the ends of the earth, at humanity's call, to save and to succour, no matter what the colour or the faith of the suppliants, there is cruelty practised towards multitudes of the most helpless and tender of our race, of a most appalling character, and such as was never heard of in the darkest regions, in the most oppressed kingdoms. But it would be untimely to indulge in bitter irony or indignant comment, when we have not sufficient space for the crying facts which present themselves; and therefore without another word of sentiment we hasten to make such a selection as may at least direct the attention of our readers to the subject of this Report.

The investigation pursued in this case, which relates exclusively to mines, was directed by royal commission, with a view" to collect information as to the ages at which the objects of it are employed, the number of hours they are engaged in work, the time allowed each day for meals; as to their actual state, condition, and treatment; and as to the effects of such employment, both with regard to their morals and their bodily health.' The Report is very voluminous, while the facts which it elicits not only address themselves urgently to humanity, but afford an insight never before publicly obtained relative to various highly important branches of British labour and industry. Nothing like completeness could belong to the statistics of the national economy while there was total ignorance of the condition of those who toil in the bowels of the earth.

Four gentlemen, viz., Mr. Robert Saunders, Mr. Leonard Horner, Dr. Southwood Smith, and Mr. Thomas Tooke, were appointed by the commission to supply the Report. There were also assistant commissioners selected, who were to act under the directions of the gentlemen forming the Central Board, each of whom had a particular district and locality assigned to him for investigation; the object of which investigation, as will be observed from the terms of the royal commission, were of two natures, moral as well as physical. The latter branch of the subject is sufficiently ample, interesting, and pressing to occupy us on this occasion.

There are but comparatively few of the community who can have a chance, and still fewer who entertain a desire, of exploring a coal mine. Many of the masters and proprietors themselves appear to be entire strangers to the subterraneous chambers which yield them vast treasures, and without which Great Britain would be but an insignificant country in the rank of nations. It naturally results

that gross oppression and monstrous evils may exist for a long series of years in places to which the eye of scrutiny, or even the light of heaven, never reaches; and the more inaccessible and the less frequently visited the mine, the more heart-rending, as we shall find, are the scenes.

It will hardly require any description to enable the most entire stranger to the appearance and character of a coal-mine to comprehend the general differences which occur in them, with regard to dampness and wetness, foul air, and intractableness of the minerals. to be worked. But the great distinction between one coal-mine and another seems to arise from the comparative thickness or thinness of the stratum or seam of coal; for when it is six feet in thickness, it is obvious that, without any waste of labour, in order to make room for working in a standing posture, and of ready conveyance along the passages to the shaft, the whole operations may be carried on; whereas if the seam be only half of that thickness, and often it is less, there will be as little labour spent in hewing down clay or stone as possible; and therefore both the hewer, and the person that has to convey the coal to the shaft, have to work constantly in a crouching, reclining, or otherwise constrained position, from morning till night.

In several districts the seams average from five to ten feet. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, for example, many of the seams are most uncomfortably thin; and when wetness and thinness predominate, our readers will immediately understand the nature of the misery and horror that have to be encountered.

Darkness, to a stranger to these mines, would be one discomfort. But when it is added that the springs which generally ooze through the best cased shafts, trickle down the sides, and keep up a perpetual drizzle below; that the chamber or area at the bottom of the shaft is almost always sloppy and muddy; that the escape from it consists in a labyrinth of black passages, often not three by four feet square; and that although the dampness increases as you advance, the subterraneous smell increases, the idea of misery must enlarge. Says one witness, "The place I work in is very wet; the water is half a yard deep in some places. My husband has worked in wet places for many a year; sometimes he has worked in water up to his knees, and does now where he is at work. When I am drawing for him my clothes are all wet through." One of the assistant commissioners, speaking of a particular pit, says that he walked, crept, and rode 1,800 yards, where the bottom or floor was every here and there three or four inches deep in water, and muddy throughout. "The Swan Bank Pit, to which I was accompanied by Dr. Smith and Mr. Saunders, was almost as bad, and more resembled a city drain than anything else. In some of them I have had to creep upon my hands and knees the whole distance,

the height being barely twenty inches, and then have gone still lower upon my breast, and crawled like a turtle."

Most of our readers must be aware that females work in coal pits, and many may also have heard that boys and girls are numerously employed in our mines. But few, we presume, ever dreamt that children at six, seven, and eight years of age are not only from an early to a late hour daily confined to these mines, but are subjected to a species of solitude and employment of unimagined irksomeness. Let us now attend to the nature of that employment,we mean for the younger ones, who have not yet acquired the physical strength that can be turned to hard drudgery and continued labour. Observe first the plan and arrangement of a coal pit:

Coal lies in an inclined plane, of which the inclination downwards, called in Yorkshire "the dip," is about one in eleven yards, and generally towards the east (magnetic). At the lowest point in the field to be worked is sunk the engine-shaft for pumping the water out of the pit; a few yards higher up the coal-bed is sunk the working-shaft for drawing the coal. From the bottom of each of these shafts roads or galleries are driven parallel to each other, and nearly, but not quite, at right angles to the dip of the coal, so that each may rise gently from the shafts. The gallery from the engineshaft is for the conveyance of water, and is called the water-level. The gallery from the working-shaft is for the conveyance of coal, and is called the main-road, or working-level.

Ventilation is a matter of great importance in coal pits. Each colliery has two or more shafts, perhaps twenty yards from each other; one, the downcast pit, sunk towards the dip of the strata, for the air to descend, and the other, the upcast pit, towards their rise, for it to return to the surface. The current is generally quickened by a furnace in the upcast shaft, which, rapidly drawing off the air in the passages below, brings a brisk current through the whole distance from the downcast pit, however great that distance, by its purposed tortuousness, may have been made. The ventilating furnace naturally puts the current of air in motion in the straightest possible direction, and therefore to direct this current into the various intricacies of the workings, stoppings of brick or stone are used in the "dead" passages, and doors in those passages used for the transit of coals. Our readers are now in some measure prepared to understand the nature of the employment to which the children are put :—

As the air invariably takes the shortest course, not a breath of it would pass up the board-gates or visit a single bank-face, were the doors left open so as to allow it to pass straight back to the upcast shaft. The ventilation depends entirely on the trap-doors being kept shut, and on their being properly closed immediately after the carriages conveying the coal VOL. II. (1842.) NO. II.

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