§ 222. Contemporary Evidence of the New Order of Things. A very good idea of the effects of the introduction of the factory system upon the operatives may be formed from a resolution unanimously adopted, after some riots similar to those referred to above, by the magistrates at the quarter sessions of Preston, in Lancashire, and dated November 11th, 1779, wherein it was resolved: "That the sole cause of great riots was the new machines employed in the cotton manufacture: that the county [i.e. the manufacturers] had greatly benefited by their erection, and that the destroying them in one county only led to their erection in another; and that if a total stop were put by the legislature to their erection in Britain it would only tend to their establishment in foreign countries, to the detriment of the trade in Britain." But better than the cold words of a formal resolution is the description of the country round Manchester, published in 1795 by Dr Aikin. He points out what we have already referred to, that "the sudden invention and improvement of machines to shorten labour have had a surprising influence to extend our trade, and also to call in hands from all parts, particularly children for the cotton mills." He says that domestic life is seriously endangered by the extensive employment of women and girls in the mills, for they had become ignorant of all household duties. "The females are wholly uninstructed in knitting, sewing, and other domestic affairs requisite to make them frugal wives and mothers. This is a very great misfortune to them and to the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the labourers in husbandry, and those of manufacturers in general. In the former we meet with neatness, cleanliness, and comfort; in the latter with filth, rags, and poverty." He also mentions the great prevalence of fevers among employés in cotton mills, consequent upon the utterly insanitary conditions under which they laboured. But 1 Quoted in The History of the Factory Movement, i. 11, by "Alfred” (Samuel Kydd). 2 The full title is A Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round Manchester. John Aikin, M.D. (1747-1822), was a brother of Mrs Barbauld. nowhere were the evils which accompanied the sudden growth of wealth and of industry so marked as in the case of those miserable beings who were brought to labour in the new mills under the apprentice system. Their life was literally and without exaggeration simply that of slaves. § 223. English Slavery. The Apprentice System. When factories were first built there was a strong repugnance on the part of parents who had been accustomed to the old family life under the domestic system to send their children into these places. It was, in fact, considered a disgrace so to do: the epithet of "factory girl" was the most insulting that could be applied to a young woman, and girls who had once been in a factory could rarely find employment elsewhere.1 Perhaps this was due to the shocking immorality (especially of the masters) in the early factories. It was not until the wages of the workman had been reduced to a starvation level that they consented to their children and wives being employed in the mills. But the manufacturers wanted labour by some means or other, and they got it from the workhouses. sent for parish apprentices from all parts of England, and pretended to apprentice them to the new employments just introduced. The millowners systematically communicated with the overseers of the poor, who arranged a day for the inspection of pauper children. Those chosen by the manufacturer were then conveyed by waggons or canal boats to their destination, and from that moment were doomed to slavery. Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a millowner in want of hands,5 who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, 3 4 1 History of the Factory Movement, i. 16. 2 Cf. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, ch. iv. They 3 The Heads of the Bill permitting this (1796) are given in the History of the Factory Movement, i. 4, 5. 4 Ib., i. 17. * Ib., p. 17. exactly as did the slave-dealers in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed or clothe properly, because they were so cheap, and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the millowner with every twenty sane children.1 The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. Their treatment was most inhuman. The hours of their labour were limited only by exhaustion, after many modes of torture 2 had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Illness was no excuse: no child was accounted ill till it was positively impossible to force him or her to continue to labour, in spite of all the cruelty which the ingenuity of a tormentor could suggest.3 Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the machinery. The author of The History of the Factory Movement writes: "In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness."6 They were fed upon the coarsest and cheapest food, often with the same as that served out to the pigs of their master. They slept by 1 History of the Factory Movement, i. pp. 17, 43. 2 For ghastly examples see the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, or, more conveniently, Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 192. 3 Ib. 4 Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 21; and Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 196. 5 Alfred, i. 21. "Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 21, 22. 7 Memoirs of Blincoe, quoted by Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 23; also corroborated by other evidence, i. 25. turns and in relays, in filthy beds which were never cool; for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon as the others had gone off to their daily or nightly toil. There was often no discrimination of sexes; and disease, misery, and vice grew as in a hotbed of contagion. Some of these miserable beings tried to run away. To prevent their doing so, those suspected of this tendency had irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to work and sleep in these chains, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this brutal treatment. Many died, and were buried secretly at night in some desolate spot, lest people should notice the number of the graves; and many committed suicide.3 The catalogue of cruelty and misery is too long to recite here; it may be read in the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice, or in the pages of the Blue-books of the beginning of this century, in which even the methodical and dry language of official documents is startled into life by the misery it has to relate. It is perhaps not well for me to say more about the subject, for one dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told about this awful page in the history of industrial England. I need only remark, that during this period of unheeded and ghastly suffering in the mills of our native land, the British philanthropist was occupying himself with agitating for the relief of the woes of negro slaves in other countries. He, of course, succeeded in raising the usual amount of sentiment, and perhaps more than the usual amount of money, on behalf of an inferior and barbaric race, who have repaid him by relapsing into a contented indolence and a scarcely concealed savagery which have gone far to ruin our 1 1 Cf. Alfred, History, i. 17; Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 198; cf. also evidence of J. Paterson, overseer, Dundee, before the Sadler Committee, 1832. 2 Blincoe, quoted in Alfred's History of the Factory Movement, i. 23. 3 Ib., i. 24, 25. No inquests were ever held. These first appeared in Vol. I. of a periodical called The Lion, published by Richard Carlile, 62 Fleet Street, London, but afterwards issued separately. I have seen a separate copy in the Manchester Free Library; cf. also No. 21 of The Poor Man's Advocate (Manchester, June 9, 1832); there are copious extracts in Taylor and Alfred, u. s. possessions in the West Indies. The spectacle of England buying the freedom of black slaves by riches drawn from the labour of her white ones, affords an interesting study for the cynical philosopher. All this time the friends of the negro were harrowing the feelings of the inhabitants of the country in which these daily and nightly cruelties were perpetrated with tales of the sufferings of the unfortunate black men. No notice was taken of the horrors going on under the very eyes of the agitators, till at length the miseries of the factories began to avenge themselves upon a callous population in the shape of malignant fevers, bred from the horribly insanitary conditions of the mills in which these wretched creatures worked. § 224. The Beginning of the Factory Agitation. The state of things in factories where large numbers of apprentices were employed became, in fact, so bad that at last something had to be done. In 1802 an Act1 was passed, by the influence of the first Sir Robert Peel, "for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills." It is a significant fact that the immediate cause of this bill was the fearful spread through the factory districts of Manchester of epidemic disease, owing to the overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, and overcrowding in unhealthy dwellings of the workpeople, especially the children. The hours of work were 'reduced' to only twelve per day. This Act, however, did not apply to children residing near the factory where they were employed, for they were supposed to be "under the supervision of their parents." The result was that, although the apprentice system was discontinued, other children came to work in the mills, and were treated almost as brutally, though fortunately they were not entirely in the hands of their master. But the evils of this system of child labour were very great. 1 Act 42 Geo. III., c. 73. 2 Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 27. |