4 BOTTOM FISHING IN THE NOTTINGHAM STYLE. 



and any one would have said at that time, " Surely here is the 

 place where the working man may enjoy life, uncankered by 

 disease, and stretching out to its natural length," yet, what 

 was the state of affairs then ? There was a death-rate of 

 thirty-four in the thousand, ten or twelve per thousand more 

 than London with all its overcrowding, and double that of 

 the percentage of country districts throughout England ; two 

 or three thousand souls were killed annually in Sheffield by 

 imsanitary conditions, as certainly as though that number 

 had been gathered once a year in some horrid "black hole," 

 and suffocated in their own poisoning exhalations. One 

 could see the alleys from which reeking and undrained cess- 

 pools spread the pestilence which walks by night, and rests 

 not by day from its mysterious work of destruction. We 

 heard of young men growing prematurely old, with dirty 

 white and sallow faces, with " dropped wrists," with an ever 

 present feeling of illness, strange blue lines encircling their 

 teeth, shortness of breath, stooping and bent frames, and of 

 consumption and paralysis. We heard of children driven to 

 the " hulls " to learn to work before they had time to learn 

 to play ; we heard of death in certain trades when the workers 

 reached thirty or thirty-five, and in others though they lived 

 somewhat longer, they were robbed of twenty or twenty-five 

 years of natural life. All these things make such a picture 

 that we never forget it, and we have or seem to have a vivid 

 conception of the strange results of British freedom and civi- 

 lization, and we could seem to see then baby faces in the 

 agonies of premature death ; sixty-one poor innocents out of a 

 hundred under five years of age dying in one year in Sheffield 

 was a ghastly chorus to the song of that empire on which 

 the sun never sets. But now we find a great change has 

 come over Sheffield, though there is still room for improve- 

 ment. We cannot wonder that the men of Sheffield with 

 such a picture as I have described tlirust before their faces, 



