282 The Public Health. [ April, 
2. No child shall be employed on any one day in any handi- 
craft for a period of more than six-and-a-half hours, and such 
employment shall take place between the hours of six in the morn- 
ing and eight at night. 
3. No young person or woman shall be employed in any handi- 
craft during any period of twenty-four hours for more than twelve 
hours, with intervening periods for taking meals and rest amounting 
in the whole to not less than one hour and a half, and such em- 
ployment shall take place only between the hours of five in the 
morning and nine at night. 
4, No child, young person, or woman shall be employed in any 
handicraft on Sunday or after two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, 
except in cases where not more than five persons are employed in the 
same establishment, and where such employment consists in making 
articles to be sold by retail on the premises, or in preparing articles 
of a like nature to those sold by retail on the premises. 
All persons employing women or children in contravention of 
this Act are liable to fines set forth in the Act. All inspectors and 
officers of health suspecting the Act to be infringed can have 
power granted them to enter premises by the order of a justice. 
Further provisions are made in this Act for the education of 
children employed in factories. 
This Act, like all other sanitary Acts, is only permissive. 
Should it please a vestry to shut its eyes to the evils of overworking 
children and women, they may allow the Act to remain a dead 
letter. There is, however, one vestry in London that has moved 
in this matter, and that of a parish which has perhaps more over- 
worked women in it than any parish in London, and that is the 
parish of Saint James, Westminster. This parish which, in a 
population of 36,000, numbers 1,500 sempstresses, presents a 
legitimate field for the operation of this Act. The vestry have 
ordered that the Act be circulated through the parish, and that all 
complaints of the infringements of its regulations shall be registered 
at the vestry-hall for the purposes of inquiry, and prosecution if 
necessary. The same has been done in some country-towns in 
Scotland. 
Lrreps.—We have to submit to our readers this time a special 
report on the sanitary condition of Leeds. Coincident with the 
generally improved state of the public health, Leeds, as contrasted 
with the past, presents a favourable aspect. The mortality during 
the present year, up to March 7th, has been at the rate of 24 per 
1,000 per annum, against 32, 36, and 29 in the corresponding 
periods of 1865-1867. The sanitary condition, however, can be 
more correctly gauged by reference to that truest of all tests, the 
comparative number of deaths from Zymotic diseases. 
