There is no more terrible page in history than that which records the
enslavement of mere babies by the industrial revolution of the
eighteenth century in England. Not even the crucifixion of twenty
thousand slaves along the highways by Scipio excels it in horror.
Writing in 1795, Dr. Aikin gives a vivid account of the evils which had
already been introduced in the factory districts by the new system of
manufacture.[90] He mentions the destruction of the best features of
home life, the spread of filth, thriftlessness, poverty, and disease,
and says that the demand for “children for the cotton mills” had become
very great. To get children for the cotton mills was not easy at first.
Parental love and pride were ranged against the new system, denying its
demands. Accustomed to the old domestic system, the association of all
the members of the family in manufacture as part of the domestic life,
they regarded the new industrial forms with repugnance. It was
considered a degradation for a child to be sent into the factories,
especially for a girl, whose whole life would be blasted thereby. The
term “factory girl” was an insulting epithet, and the young woman who
bore it could not hope for other, better employment, nor yet for
marriage with any but the very lowest and despised of men. Not till they
were forced by sheer hunger and misery, through the reduction of wages
to the level of starvation, could the respectable workers be induced to
send their children into the factories. In the meantime they made war
upon the “iron men,” as the machines were called, but of course in vain.
To such a conflict there could be only one end,—human beings of flesh
and blood could not prevail against the iron monsters, their
competitors.
But the manufacturers wanted children, and they got them from the
workhouses. It was not difficult to persuade Bumbledom to get rid of its
pauper children, especially when its conscience was salved by the
specious pretext that the children were to be taught new trades, as
apprentices. “Alfred,” the anonymous author of the _History of the
Factory Movement_,[91] gives a thrilling description of the horrible
inhumanity and wickedness of this practice of sending parish
apprentices, “without remorse or inquiry, to be _used up_ as the
cheapest raw material in the market.” The mill owners would first
communicate with the overseers of the poor, and the latter would fix
suitable dates for the manufacturers or their agents to examine the
children. Those chosen were then conveyed to their destination, closely
packed in wagons or canal-boats. Thenceforth they were doomed to the
most miserable slavery. A class of “traffickers” in child slaves arose.
These men made a profitable business of supplying children to the
manufacturers. They deposited their victims in dark, dank cellars, where
the sales to the manufacturers or their agents were made. “The mill
owners, by the light of lanterns being able to examine the children,
their limbs and stature having undergone the necessary scrutiny, the
bargain was struck, and these poor innocents were conveyed to the
mills.” Their plight was appalling. They received no wages, and they
were so cheap, their places so easily filled, that the mill owners did
not even take the trouble to give them decent food or clothing. “In
stench, in heated rooms, amid the 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.”
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