CHAPTER XXXIII.—SKILLED LABOUR.

THIS HIS class of labour is performed by that great army of working-men and women who, in the exercise of their trades, have to employ special operations of intellect and skillfulness of manipulations, to which the appellation "handicraft" is most happily applied.

The following list contains, in round numbers, the principal trades of this kind, with the omission of those miscellaneous employments and small trades numbering less than 1,000 persons:

These 4,000,000 workpeople, including both masters and men, represent labour to the enormous amount of 1,200,000,000

working-days per annum, calculated at 300 working-days per individual. This class of labour stands in favourable contrast to that required in factories and manufactures, because it is mostly performed by males, whilst factory labour, which, by its nature, is the more dangerous of the two, is largely shared by women and children. The proportions between the number of males and females and children employed in factory work and skilled labour is stated in the factory inspectors' report to be the following:-In 7997 textile factories, and in 83 nontextile trades, and in 15,031 works of various kinds, making a grand total of 23,346 works, there are employed 94,346 children, 720,478 females, and 1,290,159 males; the textile factories alone employing 42,200 children, and 574,357 females.

The disproportion of too large a number of females, especially in the textile manufactures, is, however, not the only thing objectionable; but female labour is also in many other employments sadly out of place, and tends to destroy the delicacy of the female character. In blast furnaces, iron mills, foundries and in the nail manufacture, women are still employed, where they are exposed to an atmosphere thickly loaded with smoke and coal dust, which effaces the whiteness of their skin by a layer of soot, thus destroying one of the principal charms of woman's beauty. We may therefore heartily support the suggestion of the factory inspectors, that the employment of female labour in the above named occupations should be prohibited by law. By this means the following number of female workers employed in

would be withdrawn from work and places which are degrading to woman's nature.

The author refers, however, with great sorrow to the plea of poverty and necessity put in for an excuse of the presence of women in those places, and he pities especially those who