THE FACTORY SYSTEM AND ITS RESULTS
§ 1. THE RESULTS OF THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM--The
great war of which I have just spoken in the preceding chapter found
England at its beginning a nation whose mainstay was agriculture,
with manufactures increasing, it is true, but still only of secondary
importance. At the commencement of the war, English workers spun
and wove in their cottages; at its close they were herded together
in factories, and were the servants of machinery. The capitalist
element had become the main feature in production, and the capitalist
manufacturers the main figures in English industry, rivalling and often
overtopping the landed gentry. But a man cannot become a capitalist
without capital, and capital cannot be accumulated without labour;
though these remarkably obvious facts are constantly forgotten. The
large capitalists of earlier manufacturing days obtained their capital,
after the first small beginnings, from the wealth produced by their
workmen and from their own acuteness in availing themselves of new
inventions. Of the wealth produced by their workmen they took nearly
the whole, leaving their employés only enough to live upon while
producing {177} more wealth for their masters. Hence it may be said
that capital was in this case the result of abstinence, though the
abstinence was on the part of the workman and not of his employer, as
we shall shortly see.
This, then, was the immediate result of the factory system: the growth
of large accumulations of capital in the hands of the new master
manufacturers, who with their new machinery, undisturbed by internal
war, were able to supply the nations of Europe with clothing at a time
when these nations were too much occupied in internecine conflicts
on their own soil to produce food and clothing for themselves. Even
Napoleon, in spite of all his edicts directed against English trade,
was fain to clothe his soldiers in Yorkshire stuffs when he led them
to Moscow. It was no wonder that the growth of capital was rapid and
enormous. Other results followed. The formerly widespread cottage
industry was now aggregated into a few districts, nearly all in
Lancashire and Yorkshire. Persons of all ages and both sexes were
collected together in huge buildings, under no moral control, with
no arrangements for the preservation of health, comfort, or decency.
The enormous extension of trade rendered extra work necessary, and
the mills ran all night long as well as by day. The machines made “to
shorten labour” resulted in many cases in vastly extending it; while
in others again they took away all the means of livelihood from the
old class of hand-workers. Hence riots frequently occurred, and the
labourers sought to destroy the new machinery; the struggle of what
were called “the iron men” against human beings of flesh and blood long
continued to be a source of controversy and complaint, more especially
as the workmen saw that the profits made by these iron men went almost
entirely into the hands of their masters. {178}
§ 2. 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 by the
magistrates at the quarter sessions of Preston, in Lancashire, 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
a 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 unsanitary {179} conditions
under which they laboured. But 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.
§ 3. 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 never find employment elsewhere. 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. They got it from the workhouses. They sent for parish apprentices
from all parts of England, and pretended to apprentice them to the
new employments just introduced. The mill-owners 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 wagons 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 mill-owner in want of
hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily
capacities, exactly as did the slave-dealers in the American markets.
{180} 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
mill-owner with every twenty sane children. 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 only limited by exhaustion after many modes of torture had
been unavailingly applied to force continued work. 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[51]: “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 over-looker, and
the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented
by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.” 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 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 {181} 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. 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 dry official
language 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 very largely imaginary
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 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.
[51. Samuel Kydd (pseudonym “Alfred”).]
§ 4. THE BEGINNING OF THE FACTORY AGITATION--The state of things in
factories where large numbers of apprentices {182} were employed
became so bad, that at last something had to be done. In 1802 an
Act was passed “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 12
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 luckily they were
not entirely in the hands of their master. But the evils of this system
of child labour were very great. During the whole of the period of 1800
to 1820, and even to 1840, the results of their sufferings were seen in
the early deaths of the majority of children and in the crippled and
distorted forms of the majority of those who survived. On the women
and grown-up girls the effects of long hours and wearisome work were
equally disastrous. A curious inversion of the proper order of things
was seen in the domestic economy of the victims of this cheap labour
system, for women and girls were superseding men in manufacturing
labour, and, in consequence, their husbands had often to attend, in a
shiftless, slovenly fashion, to those household duties which mothers
and daughters hard at work in the factories were unable to fulfil.
Worse still, mothers and fathers in some cases lived upon the killing
labour of their little children, by letting them out {183} to hire to
manufacturers, who found them cheaper than their parents.
The factory hands in general, and the children in particular, at
length found help from a few philanthropists who had not allowed
themselves to be dazzled by the glowing eloquence of the agitators
against black slavery. Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury,
and Richard Oastler must in especial be mentioned as the champions of
the mill-hands. Long years after Lord Shaftesbury had succeeded in his
noble work, he spoke of the sad sights he had seen during his earlier
labours in the factory districts. “Well can I recollect,” he said in a
speech in the House of Lords in 1873, “in the earlier periods of the
factory movement, waiting at the factory gates to see the children
come out, and a set of sad, dejected, cadaverous creatures they were.
In Bradford especially the proofs of long and cruel toil were most
remarkable. The cripples and distorted forms might be numbered by
hundreds, perhaps by thousands. A friend of mine collected a vast
number together for me; the sight was most piteous, the deformities
incredible. They seemed to me, such were their crooked shapes, like a
mass of crooked alphabets.” A corroboration of his words is found in
one of Southey’s letters to Mr May (written March 1st, 1833), in which,
speaking of factory labour, he remarked with justice: “the slave trade
is mercy compared to it.”
The companion of the famous Lord Shaftesbury in the factory agitation
was Richard Oastler, who was born in 1789 and died in 1861, and at
first, especially in 1807, was a great supporter of Wilberforce in his
anti-slavery agitation. But, living as he did in the factory districts
of Yorkshire, he discovered a worse slavery existing at his very doors,
and at once decided to do his best to put a stop to it. From 1829 to
1832 he was the leader of the {184} movement for a “ten hours day,”
and from 1830 to 1847 he devoted himself especially to stopping the
oppression of children in factories, till he caused the Factories
Regulation Acts to be passed. A short reference to these Factory Acts
will not be out of place.
§ 5. THE VARIOUS FACTORY ACTS--After the Act of 1802 already referred
to for improving the condition of apprentices, an Act for the
regulation of work in cotton mills was passed in 1819, allowing no
child to be admitted into a factory before the age of nine, and placing
12 hours a day as the limit of work for those between the ages of nine
and sixteen. The day was really one of 13½ or 14 hours, because
no meal-times were included in the working day. Then again in 1831 an
Act was passed forbidding night-work in factories for persons between
nine and twenty-one years of age, while the working day for persons
under eighteen was to be 12 hours a day, and 9 hours on Saturdays. But
this legislation only applied to cotton factories; those engaged in
the manufacture of wool were quite untouched, and matters there were
as bad as ever. But a spirit of agitation was fortunately abroad in
the country. These were the days of the Reform Bill and of the rise of
Trade Unions. These unions of workmen cried out for the restriction of
non-adult labour to 10 hours a day, and the Conservative party, who
were chiefly interested in the land and not in the mills, supported
them readily against the manufacturers, who were mainly Liberals and
Radicals. The two most important Acts were those of 1833 and 1847.
That of 1833, introduced by Lord Shaftesbury, prohibited night-work
to persons under eighteen in both cotton, wool, and other factories;
children from nine to thirteen years of age were not to work more than
48 hours a week, and young persons from thirteen to {185} eighteen
years were to work only 68 hours. Provision was also made for the
children’s attendance at school, and for the appointment of factory
inspectors. These restrictions in the employment of children led to
a great increase in the use of improved machinery to make up for the
loss of their labour, and it is probable that they accelerated the
use of steam power instead of water power in the smaller and more
old-fashioned mills. Then, after one or two minor Acts, the famous
Ten Hours Bill (10 Vict. c. 29) was passed in 1847, which reduced the
labour of women and young persons to 10 hours a day, the legal day
being between 5.30 A.M. and 8.30 P.M. Manufacturers tried to avoid the
provisions of this Bill by working persons thus protected in relays,
but this was stopped by the fixing of a uniform working day in 1850,
so that young persons and women could only work between the hours of 6
A.M. and 6 P.M., and on Saturdays only till 2 P.M. Since the passing
of these Acts a great many much needed extensions of their provisions
to other industries have been made, and in 1874 the minimum age at
which a child could be admitted to a factory was fixed at ten years.
The limitation of the labour of women and young persons necessarily
involved the limitation of men’s labour, because their work could not
be done without female aid. Thus the ten hours day at last became
universal in factories.
§ 6. HOW THESE ACTS WERE PASSED--It is curious to notice how these Acts
were passed. They all showed the steady advance of the principle of
State interference with labour; a doctrine most distasteful to the old
Ricardian school of economists, even when that interference was made
in the interests of the physical and moral well-being, not only of the
industrial classes, but of the community at large. Hence the economists
of the day aided the {186} manufacturers in opposing these Acts to
the utmost of their power, and the laws passed were due to the action
of the Tories and land-owners. Lord Shaftesbury, Fielden, Oastler, and
Sadler were all Tories, though they were accused of being Socialists.
They were supported by the landed gentry. But the mill-owners had
their revenge afterwards when they helped to repeal the Corn Laws in
spite of the protest of the landlords, who did not mind the workmen
having shorter hours at other people’s expense, but objected to their
having cheap bread at their own. The working classes cannot fail
to observe that each party was their friend only in so far as they
could injure their opponents, or at least do no harm to themselves.
John Bright especially distinguished himself (Feb. 10, 1847) by his
violent denunciation of the Ten Hours Bill, which he characterized as
“one of the worst measures ever passed in the shape of an Act of the
legislature.”[52] In 1908 a Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill was passed
into law.
[52. This extraordinary utterance is to be found in the
records of Hansard, third series, volume 89, page 1148.]
But when we look back upon the degradation and oppression from
which the industrial classes were rescued by this agitation, we can
understand why Arnold Toynbee said so earnestly: “I tremble to think
what this country would have been but for the Factory Acts.” They
form one of the most interesting pages in the history of industry,
for they show how fearful may be the results of a purely capitalist
and competitive industrial system, unless the wage-earners are in a
position to act as an effectual check upon the greed of an unscrupulous
employer.
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