were actually transferred by sale from one part of the country to another. During the lapse of the present century, the son of an extensive coal proprietor was engaged in examining, with a friend, the pits of a proprietor in another part of the field; and finding a collier, the tones of whose speech resembled those of the colliers of his own district he enquired whether he had not originally belonged to it? ‘Oh,’ exclaimed the man, with apparent surprise, ‘d’ye no ken me? Do ye no mind that your faither sold me for a pouny?’”
That ignorance and vice were the characteristics of such a condition of society goes without saying. It was inevitable, more especially when we remember that the women were veritably yoke fellows with their husbands and brothers in this degrading service. Here is the evidence of an eye-witness to their work, which was to carry up to the surface in baskets or creels the coal hewn from the same, from which they were called ‘‘ coal bearers.”’ ‘Each bears a lamp fastened to her head to light the long upward ascent, and, laden with more than a hundredweight of coal, and bent forward at nearly a right angle to avoid coming in contact with the low roof, they ascend slowly along the flights of steps, and through the narrow galleries, and lastly up the long stair of the shaft ; and when they have reached the surface, they unload at the coal heap and return, And such is the employment of females for twelve, and sometimes fifteen hours together.” It has been estimated by Mr Robert Bald, the distinguished mining engineer, that one of their ordinary day’s work was equal to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of the sea to the top of Ben Lomond. These poor collier women—the coal bearers of the old Scotch Acts—were even more strongly marked by the slave nature in this part of the country than the men. Hugh Miller says :—
“I have seen them crying like children when toiling, nearly exhausted under the load, along the steep upper stages of their journeys to the surface, and then returning with empty creels, scarce a minute after, singing with glee. They were marked, too, by a peculiar type of mouth ; both the upper and under lip drooped forward, swollen, meaningless, void of all marks indicative of compressive control of mind. It was the mouth of the savage in that humblest and least developed condition of which great weakness is an even more deplorable trait than the prevailing rudeness and barbarism. I describe, however, a state of things which has already become obsolete in the district. Women are no longer employed as animals of burden in our Scottish coal pits. The drooping, degraded type
