and young men the case is different, for there is no need of their going straight home to their families when work is over, so the masters can keep them in the school-room or elsewhere, and gain their affections and get great influence over them. With many of our young men we are, I trust, upon terms of true and deep personal friendship such as will last for life. Of course when they in their turn become masters of families there will be the same want of much intercourse as with our present men; but when you once know a man thoroughly, and he you, the mere moving about in the same work with a kindly word or look when you happen to be thrown together, quite keeps up the cordiality of feeling. In speaking of not knowing the men generally, I should however say there are many exceptions, at least as true and as happy as with the boys; and anything tending to increase the number of exceptions, as our cricket and gardens were found in practice to do last year, is of very great value. You catch the men one by one as circumstances bring them within your reach, the boys a whole net-full together, but with both of them it seems to be of comparatively very little consequence what it is with which you first get a real hold over them-gardens, or cricket, or schooling, or some trouble which they come to consult you about.'

A life of severe toil, at least of monotonous drudgery, wants some breaks of amusement, some gleams of light, to prevent its utterly depressing both the physical and the moral health; and as the recreations which artisans, especially young ones, are capable of entering into are almost exclusively of a bodily kind, they need control and superintendence. If left wholly to their own devices they will almost infallibly plunge into gross sensual indulgence; much that is open to the wealthier orders in the way of enjoyment is a sealed book, an unknown language to them; though they may in time be trained to appreciate higher kinds of pleasure, they are not as yet capable of doing so; and after all they want pleasure connected with fresh air. We are not wishing to have the Maypoles back, or to play at the manners of bygone times; but the existence of the 'fustian jacket' order needs to be brightened by some out-of-door exercise; and we know no medium so effectual for the cure of moral acidity or the jaundice of dissatisfaction and discontent. A yellow, bilious troop cooped up in hot work-rooms day after day, and only trudging home to their murky dreary 'row,' run great risks of being disaffected. There is a close connexion between the liver and the heart. Many Cascas grow up in factory life purely because that nether organism has nothing like fair play. That, be sure, will never feed the temper on which not a few of our politicians live, and some thrive apace.

Mr. Wilson soon found that these games of cricket had great influence in softening down the hardships and dreariness of

factory

factory life, especially as regards night labour, which begins at Belmont at six in the evening and ends at six in the morning:

'The boys who are on night work do not go to bed directly their work is over, being generally unable to sleep if they do so. They used to dawdle about, or to take a walk, or in some other way get rid of the time till a little later in the day, when they went to bed just time enough to get as much sleep as they needed before getting up for work again. The same boys are not always at night-work, but there are two gangs which take it in turns. Now all last summer the night-gang of boys, on leaving work at six o'clock in the morning, went straight to the field, and there they thoroughly enjoyed themselves in gardening and cricket until about a quarter past eight; they then collected in a shed which we have on the ground to hear a verse or two of the New Testament read to them, and to say the Lord's Prayer together before going home to sleep; and the way in which they joined in this little religious service, coming as it did just as a part of their enjoyment, could make one hope for very happy effects from it. I think, had the factory and its profits belonged to me, and had the cricket and garden cost double what I have stated, I should have thought it but a sort of conscience-money, well spent in strengthening the physical and moral health of these boys, obliged by the necessity of the work to keep such unnatural hours. On four mornings a week they went out in this way; on the other two they attended school from six till eight, to prevent their falling behind through missing the evening school, which of course they must do when on night-work.'

Having adopted this system of recreation to sweeten toil, mixing with it other ingredients to make it promote yet higher purposes, Mr. Wilson's next movement was to have a 'day of it,' and to whirl his charge far from cauldrons, candles, smoke, and smut, from the close streets of a crowded neighbourhood, among the fine hills that overlook Guildford. Here they strolled about, played a cricket match-the apprentices against the rest of the people-and in the middle of the day, by way of rest and refreshment, all gathered together in a small church at the top of one of the hills, and, having obtained the willing services of the clergyman of the place, chanted their part of the service. It must have been a striking and touching scene--that first, we fancy, of the sortthe holiday workers of a London factory chanting the Psalms in the old Norman chapel, in that fresh region remote and clear from the din and dinginess of their accustomed atmosphere. Mr. Wilson had some doubt how far divine service would chime in with the other proceedings of the day; it answered perfectly. The country itself seems to have made its impression; it was,' as he says,

'so absolute a contrast in its quietness and extreme beauty to all the

common

common life of these boys, that one felt what a world of new ideas and feelings they were being introduced to. From the way they looked at and spoke of the country to each other when they were there, and spoke of it after returning, I am sure many of them, if they live till ninety, will remember that one day, and with a feeling more beneficial to their minds than any which months of ordinary schooling would be likely to produce.'

The next year an equally successful expedition was made to Herne Bay. This last season they received an invitation to Farnham Castle from the Bishop of Winchester, in whose diocese the factories are placed, and who seems to have taken a more apostolic view of episcopal 'hospitality' than has been much in vogue of late. A wiser act could not have been done. The day was a day' indeed; all went off most admirably. The Bishop and his household threw themselves heart and soul into the work of entertaining their new guests-the guests, whose only notions of Bishops, probably, had been derived from the penny literature and caricatures of Lambeth Cut, were carried away into something like enthusiasm by the humane and Christian attention with which they were received; when they found the proud, purpled, spiritual Dives of their imaginations changed into a mild, affable, generous host, a rapid revolution of early ideas was effected on the spot. They were suffered to ramble at will over the stately old palace and its picturesque grounds; they were treated and trusted as friends, and they felt the treatment. No high-born company could have behaved more decorously than those five hundred artisans, young and old, thus let loose for a summer's day. Divine service, it may be supposed, was part of the refreshment thought of in such a place; and when, in a beautiful little church near the castle, the Psalms broke forth from the whole company of the mechanics with hearty harmony, the Bishop was visibly affected, and had need thank God for witnessing such a scene. A few such days would turn the tide of Radicalism and infidelity and the worse forms of dissent which leaven the lower districts of our large towns. Let the higher clergy mix with the poor, meet them, show personal interest in their welfare, treat them with personal kindness, instead of being only seen through carriage windows as they drive along the streets, or on Confirmation days as they cross the pavement amid a blaze of beadles, and the good they may effect is untold.

The cricket and the excursion, let us remember, were used as a sort of reward-tickets for those who had stuck well to the winter evening school, and the manager is quite ready to defend his use of such sugar-plums :

"When it is considered how very much you are asking of a boy,

in asking him, after working hard in the factory from six in the morning till half-past five or six in the evening, to come into it again at half-past six for schooling till eight, and this for three or four days a week, during eight months together-and that this is asked not only of the best boys, and those naturally eager for improvement, but of all the very mixed set which such a factory as ours necessarily contains-you will not be surprised that, while always holding out the improvement as the grand inducement to belong to the school, we are glad with the general run of them to avail ourselves of other inducements also. The matter might be settled very simply by authority :but with boys beyond a certain age any such attendance as that would do them harm instead of good; while any attendance which is entirely the result of their own free will must do good-first, in the mere amount of useful knowledge gained, and secondly (but first in point of importance) in the effects of their being brought under the whole of our system; for once under that it is no matter of choice with them whether they are affected or not-they cannot avoid being so, whether they like it or not. Occasionally, in the beginning of the busy time in autumn, when we have had to take on a few elder lads, strangers, and they have been admitted at once to the school and cricket, it has been quite interesting to watch the rapid change, in external manners at least, produced in them, quite involuntarily on their part. The rough ones among them would, on the first evening of the cricket, be rude and selfish in their behaviour; and the first evening in the school they would take into their hands, with an air of mixed insolence and shame, the book for the hymn with which the school closes, and then kneel down for the prayer with the same manner-a look of "I won't refuse to do this, but I feel quite above it." But a very few evenings in the cricket and school bring them almost unconsciously to the same habit of civility and reverence as the rest; and we may hope that the change, external no doubt at first, must by degrees work inwards more or less.'

With a wise and kindly feeling for the health and physical refreshment of the fellow-creatures placed under his governance— itself a part of Christian feeling and Christian prudence, though often under-rated by the religious world'-the young manager, we must see, was watching for and catching at every opportunity to engraft Christian principles and habits. Having felt his way, and succeeded in getting among his men and boys-in breaking the ice between the employer and the employed, and in effecting a considerable moral change-he next proceeded to act more directly upon the religious character of the factory. We have been told, and we hope there is no indelicacy in repeating, that the impressions from which the whole of the Belmont movement in fact arose may be traced to his perusal, about the same time, of the Lives of Dr. Arnold and Mrs. Godolphin; but that after repeated perusals of the latter charming book, his reflections had rested especially

on

on the importance of that daily attendance on divine service to which Evelyn's saint continually refers as the chief support and solace of her brief career. Himself more and more occupied with the commercial business of the growing concern, Mr. Wilson felt it essential to have one who could give up his whole time and care to what he regarded as a still higher department of duty-and accordingly he added to his staff a clergyman of the Church, who seems to have entered on the work with the same earnest spirit. 'I look upon this appointment,' says the thoughtful and modest Manager, as the means of binding together and securing all the efforts for good that are being made in the factory, for there are many of us anxious to help forward all that is good, but we are all busy, and it seems much better that the originating and superintending of the educational arrangements should not be with any of us, but with some person with nothing else to attend to, and that we in our several positions in the factory should only have to back him up and assist him.'

6

The Belmont chaplain has no sinecure. At a quarter to six every morning he gives a short service for the men who are inclined to attend it before commencing work, and are there joined by men who have been working all the night-a sort of family worship on a large scale. They sing a hymn, have some verses of Scripture read, and join together in a few prayers. This occupies about twenty minutes, and then another short service is commenced for the boys. When this is over the chaplain attends in the Night Light' School till breakfast-time four days in the week; and the other two mornings he spends a similar space in the Candle Factory Morning School-being there occupied with a class of the most forward boys whom he desires to train as monitors for the evening school. After breakfast the brothermanagers, and their foremen, Mr. Cradock and Mr. Day, have a short service with the chaplain before the counting-house work commences. At five minutes to nine the day-school opens, and the chaplain visits and works in it.

In the afternoon

he visits the sick at their own houses, and thus becomes acquainted with the factory families. Mr. Wilson's notice of the opportunity embraced for instituting the early services is not to be omitted:

'The six o'clock service for the men was begun on the occasion of a fine lad of nineteen, a general favourite with all who had worked with him, being drowned through the swamping of a boat, in which he and three more of our young men were rowing, with one of the boys to steer them. The others were nearly drowned also, and after this shock they wished for some help in religion between Sunday and Sunday, and this little service was begun for them while the factory was still in the state of excitement attending the search during many days for the body of the poor drowned boy. But an unexpected difficulty presented itself;

the