He had no suspicion how the strong will and pertinacity of that three years child would come later into collision with the mastership of his eldest brother, or the important part these stone chips would play in William's life, or how they might affect the welfare of the whole county, or make an enduring name when his own was forgotten.
There was no necessity for Mr. Pryse to suggest 'employment' for little William. In the last century, and far into this, children were set to work and expected to earn their own living at a wofully early age, and that long before machinery came into use and drove them into factories to be the slaves of brutal overseers, who scored their six and eight year old backs with weals from whip or stick on the slightest provocation. William Hutton, the historian, tells how he, a small child of seven years, was apprenticed, in 1730, to an overseer of Lombe's silk mill, in Derby, how he had to wear high pattens to reach the machine, had to rise at five in the depth of winter and hurry to work, slipping down on the ice as he ran, and how he was beaten till his back was all festering sores. And this was no uncommon case. I, who write this, can remember when the little barefooted children went to the cotton factories and print works at five in the morning, and worked till seven or eight at night.
The boys and girls of this generation have no conception how children were trained and treated a few generations back. Not the poor only. The children of even rich parents had to endure painful punishments both at school and at home, and were fed sparely on coarse food for their health's sake. The late noble Lord Shaftesbury related how he and a sister were well-nigh starved in their childhood through the negligence of parents and servants.
History and biography teem with such instances. So that when I state that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother, who had no experience of a different state of things.
Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had never dawned on her imagination. She considered she was doing her duty by them in setting them early to work, especially as she was careful they should be taught to read also.