the evidence before Committee, &c. &c."

* * * * *

It is useless here and now to say anything of the horrors of
uncivilised savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed.
They are painted in my mother's book, and should any reader ever refer
to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory
hands at that time, he may take with him my testimony to the fact that
there was no exaggeration in the outlines of the picture given. What
we are there described to have seen, we saw.

And let doctrinaire economists preach as they will, and Radical
socialists abuse a measure, which helps to take from them the fulcrum
of the levers that are to upset the whole existing framework of
society, it is impossible for one who _did_ see those sights, and
who has visited the same localities in later days, not to bless Lord
Shaftesbury's memory, ay, and the memory, if they have left any, of
the humble assistants whose persistent efforts helped on the work.

But the little knot of apostles to whom Lord Shaftesbury's letters
introduced us, and into whose intimate _conciliabules_ his
recommendations caused our admittance, was to my mother, and yet more
to me, to whom the main social part of the business naturally fell, a
singularly new and strange one. They were all, or nearly all of them,
men a little raised above the position of the factory hands, to the
righting of whose wrongs they devoted their lives. They had been at
some period of their lives, in almost every case, factory workers
themselves, but had by various circumstances, native talent, industry,
and energy, or favouring fortune--more likely by all together--managed