collected on this subject of young girls being employed in the coal mines, except that their labour is more severe, and treatment more cruel, if possible, in the east of Scotland than elsewhere."

Young and married women. - This class is very numerous in the coal mines, and their treatment no less brutal than that of the others. We extract from their own evidence : "We learn from the commissioners that the labour required by women, is " filling, riddling, and carrying," work which none but the most robust men can endure, and which generally breaks down their iron constitution very quick.

"Janet Duncan, aged seventeen," says the Report, "was a coal bearer at Hen-muir-pit. The carts she pushed contained three cwt. of coals, and it was very severe work, especially when they had to stay before the carts to prevent their coming down too fast; they frequently run too quick and knock us down. Is able to say that the hardest day-light work is infinitely superior to the best of coal work." Margaret Drysdale, aged fifteen, "did not like the work, but her mother was dead, and her father took her down and she had no choice. Her employment is to draw carts, and she had harness or drag ropes on, like the horses."

One more, Katherine Logan, aged sixteen, "began to work at coal carrying more than five years since; works in harness now; draws backward with her face to the tubs; the ropes and chains go under her pit clothes, (which consist simply of a pair of boy's trousers ;) 'it is o'er sair work, especially when we had to crawl. "

What is the effect of such slave-toil on married women, and why do they go to the mines?

One reason why married women enter the pits is, that "if they did not work below, the children would not go down so soon." Another, "because they must go to the mines or starve, for there is work to be found no where else." Two fearful but sufficient reasons! One of these witnesses says, that the oppression of coal bearing, is such as to injure them in after life, few existing whose legs are not injured or else their hips." The following brief extracts will explain the rest :

"Jane Johnson, aged twenty-nine. - I could carry two hundred weight when fifteen years of age, but now feel the weakness upon me from the strains. I have been married nearly ten years, and have had four children, and have usually wrought till within a day of the child's birth. Many women lose their strength early from overwork, and get injured in their backs and legs."

"Jane Peacock, aged forty. I have wrought in the bowels of the earth thirty-three years. Have been married twenty-three years, and had nine children, two still born, and think they were so from oppressive work. A vast number of women have dead children and false births, which are worse, as they are not able to work after the latter. It is only horse work, and ruins the women, it crushes their haunches, bends their ancles, and makes them old women at forty.

"Isabel Wilson, aged forty-five. When on St. John's work I was a carrier of coals, which caused me to miscarry five times, from the strains, 'and I was very ill after each.

"Elizabeth M'Neil. - I knew a woman who came up, and the child was born in the field next the coal-hill. Women frequently miscarry below, and suffer much after.

"Jane Wood. - The severe work causes women much trouble. They frequently have premature births. My neighbour, Jenny M'Donald, has lain ill for six months, and William King's wife lately died from miscarriage, and a vast number of women suffer from similar causes."

The Report states that all the married women examined, (and they were many,) relate their experience to the same purport. The Herald inquires "if it may not be asked, without exaggeration, whether such a system can be regarded as any thing less than murderous ?"

"In fact," says a very intelligent witness, Mr. William Hunter, the mining foreman of Ormiston colliery, " women always did the lifting, or heavy part of the work, and neither they nor the children were treated like human beings, nor are they where they are employed. Females submit to work in places where no man, or even lad could be got to labour in; they work on bad roads, up to their knees in water, in a posture nearly dou

ble. They are below till the last stage of pregnancy. They have swelled haunches and ancles, and are prematurely brought to the grave, or, what is worse, a lingering existence."

"In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery under ground," says Robert Bald, Esq., the eminent coal viewer, " a married woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said, in a plaintive and melancholy voice, 'Oh, sir, this is sore, sore, sore work. I wish to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back, and never would have tried it again.'

"Now when the nature of this horrible labour is taken into consideration, the extreme severity, its regular duration of from twelve to fourteen hours daily, which, and once a week, as in the instance of J. Cumming, is extended through the whole of the night; the damp, heated, and unwholesome atmosphere, in which the work is carried on; the tender age, and sex of the workers; when it is considered that such labour is performed, not in isolated instances selected to excite compassion, but that it may be regarded as the type of the every-day existence of hundreds of our fellow creatures a picture is presented of deadly physical oppression, and systematic slavery, of which I conscientiously believe no one unacquainted with such facts would credit the existence in the British dominions."

But all this accumulation of torture aud murderous outrage is not the worst part of the picture. There is a hunger of spirit worse than starvation-a nakedness of soul more repulsive than that of the body--a bondage of the spirit worse than the chain of the limbs a darkness of intellect gloomier than these deep caverns where the light of heaven never shines on the dull and deadened.

This leads us to consider

The Intellectual and Moral Degradation of the Colliers. We would most gladly pass by this part of the subject, but truth requires us not to be silent. But we shall be as brief as possible, and use chiefly the language of the Commissioners. Said the Bishop of Norwich, in the House of Lords, "To this horrible physical toil extorted from them, is superadded the moral degradation to which these females are from their earliest years exposed-associated as they are with the lowest profligacy and the grossest sensuality."

"All classes of witnesses," the Report tells us, "bear the strongest testimony to the immoral effects of the practice of females working in the mines." In the southern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, in great numbers of the coal-pits, the men work in a state of perfect nakedness, and are in this state assisted by females of all ages, from girls of six years old to women of twenty