These children were found by Settlement Workers in New York City.
Illegally employed, they were never
allowed to go out of doors, their only recreation being taken in a
dark, filthy cellar.
]
Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice who, at seven years of age, was
sent from a London workhouse to a cotton mill near Nottingham, gives a
harrowing but well-authenticated account of actual experience.[92] He
tells how the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as
that given to the master’s pigs, and how he and his fellow-victims used
joyfully to say when they saw the swine being fed, “The pigs are served;
it will be our turn next.” ... “When the swine were hungry,” he says,
“they used to grunt so loud, they obtained the wash first to quiet them.
The apprentices could be intimidated, and made to keep still.” Blincoe
describes how, for fattening, the pigs were often given meat balls, or
dumplings, in their wash, and how he and the other apprentices who were
kept near the pigsties used to slip away and slyly steal as many of
these dumplings from the pigs as possible, hastening away with them to a
hiding-place, where they were greedily devoured. “The pigs ... learned
from experience to guard their food by various expedients. Made wise by
repeated losses, they kept a sharp lookout, and the moment they
ascertained the approach of the half-famished apprentices, they set up
so loud a chorus of snorts and grunts, it was heard in the kitchen, when
out rushed the swineherd, armed with a whip, from which combined means
of protection for the swine this accidental source of obtaining a good
dinner was soon lost. Such was the contest carried on for some time at
Litton Mill between the half-famished apprentices and the well-fed
swine.”
The children were worked sixteen hours at a stretch, by day and by
night. They slept by turns and relays in beds that were never allowed to
cool, one set being sent to bed as soon as the others had gone to their
toil. Children of both sexes and all ages, from five years upward, were
indiscriminately herded together, with the result that vice and disease
flourished. Sometimes the unfortunate victims would try to run away, and
to prevent this all who were suspected of such a tendency had irons
riveted on their ankles with long links reaching up to their hips. In
these chains they were compelled to work and sleep, young women and
girls as well as boys. Many children contrived to commit suicide, some
were unquestionably beaten to death; the death-rate became so great that
it became the custom to bury the bodies at night, secretly, lest a
popular uprising be provoked.[93]
Worse still, the cupidity of British Bumbledom was aroused, and it
became the custom for overseers of the poor to insist that one imbecile
child at least should be taken by the mill owner, or the trafficker,
with every batch of twenty children. In this manner the parish got rid
of the expense of maintaining its idiot children. What became of these
unhappy idiots will probably never be known, but from the cruel fate of
the children who were sane, we may judge how awful that of the poor
imbeciles must have been.
Even in the one factory of the time which was heralded as a model for
the manufacturers to copy, the mill at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by
Mr. David Dale and afterward made famous by the great and good Robert
Owen, his son-in-law, conditions were, from a twentieth-century point of
view, simply shocking, despite the fact that it was the subject of
glowing praise in the _Annual Register_ for 1792, and that, like some of
our modern factories, it had become generally regarded as a
semi-philanthropic establishment. Robert Owen tells us in his
autobiography that “children were received as early as six years old,
the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age.” These
little children worked from six in the morning till seven in the
evening, _and after that they were supposed to be educated_! “The poor
children hated their slavery; many absconded; ... at thirteen or fifteen
years old, when their apprenticeship expired, they commonly went off to
Edinburgh or Glasgow, ... altogether admirably trained for swelling the
mass of vice and misery in the towns.[94] And all this while British
philanthropists were agitating the question of negro emancipation, and
raising funds for that object!”
Thanks, mainly, to the agitation of Owen, a movement was begun to
endeavor to improve the lot of these little child slaves. This movement
received a tremendous impetus from the fearful epidemic which, in
1799–1800, spread through the factory districts of Manchester and the
surrounding country. An inquiry into the causes of this epidemic
ascribed it to overwork, scant and poor food, wretched clothing, bad
ventilation, and overcrowding, especially among the children.[95] As a
result the first act for the protection of child workers was passed
through the parliamentary exertions of Sir Robert Peel, himself a master
manufacturer. It was a very small measure of relief which this act
afforded, but it is nevertheless a most important statute to students of
industrial legislation as the “first definitely in restraint of modern
factory labor and in general opposition to the _laissez-faire_ policy in
industry.”[96] It was the first factory act ever passed by the British
Parliament. It placed no limit upon the age at which children might be
employed; it applied only to apprentices, and not to children “under the
supervision of their parents;” it reduced the hours of labor to twelve
per day, and provided for the clothing, instruction, and religious
training of the children. These provisions were clearly a survival of an
industrial system based upon paternal interest and authority.
One immediate effect of the act of 1802 was the practical break-up of
the pauper apprentice system. But it must be remembered that this system
was already outworn, and it is extremely improbable that it would have
continued to any great extent, even if the act of 1802 had not been
passed. It had served its purpose, but was no longer essential to the
manufacturers.[97] Notwithstanding that it introduced a revolutionary
principle, as we have seen, the act excited no opposition from the
manufacturers. The reason for this is not difficult to determine. Wages
had been forced down to the starvation level through the competition of
the pauper apprentices with free, adult labor, with the result that
poverty abounded. Parents were ready now to send their children into the
mills. Hunger had conquered their prejudices—the iron man had triumphed
over human flesh and blood.
It is not my purpose to trace the growth of English legislation against
child labor. This brief historical sketch is introduced for quite
another purpose, to wit, to show the origin of our modern problem of
child slavery and degradation. Suffice it to say, then, that the “free”
children who went into the mills by their parents’ “consent” were almost
as badly off as the pauper apprentices had been. They were treated just
as brutally. Even in 1830, before a meeting of philanthropists and
clergy in Bradford, Richard Oastler, the “King of the Factory Children,”
could hold up an overseer’s whip, saying, “_This_ was hard at work in
this town last week.”[98] And on the 16th of March, 1832, Michael
Sadler, M.P., in moving the second reading of his Ten Hours Bill in the
House of Commons, could say: “Sir, children are beaten with thongs
prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter
whether children or grown up, I hardly know which is the more disgusting
outrage, are beaten upon the arms, face, and bosom—beaten in your ‘free
market’ of labour, as you term it, like slaves.... These are the
instruments!” (Here, says the report in _Hansard’s Parliamentary
Debates_, the honorable member exhibited some black, heavy leathern
thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when
struck upon the table, resounded through the House.) “They are quite
equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young ... are pliant. The
marks, however, are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged, I say,
like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the
cart-whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling
against the factory thong of England.”[99] In some memorable verses this
noble parliamentary leader of the movement for factory legislation has
described such a whipping scene. The poem is too long to quote in its
entirety:—
“‘Father, I’m up, but weary,
I scarce can reach the door,
And long the way and dreary—
Oh, carry me once more!’
“Her wasted form seemed nothing—
The load was at his heart,
The sufferer he kept soothing
Till at the mill they part.
The overlooker met her,
As to her frame she crept,
And with his thong he beat her
And cursed her as she wept.
“All night with tortured feeling,
He watched his speechless child,
While, close beside her kneeling,
She knew him not, nor smiled.
Again the factory’s ringing
Her last perceptions tried;
When, from her straw bed springing,
‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[100]
A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the
grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of
evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage
from the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided
a child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of
age), the overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and
he touches the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the
corner of the room is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes
this boy, and holding him up by his legs, dips him overhead in the
cistern, and sends him to his task for the remainder of the day; and
that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his work—he has no chance of
drying himself.”[101]
Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of
the introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the
ancients believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and
destroy every vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not
been shattered, even by a century and a quarter of disappointment.
Happily, we in the United States have been practically free from some of
the worst evils of England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we
have to-day a child-labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the
heart and brain of the nation to find a solution. We, too, are
permitting the giant “iron men” to enslave our babies. The machine is
our modern Moloch, and we feed it with precious child lives.