RISE OF FACTORY SYSTEM—THE CHILD A CHARGE ON THE
STATE—CHILDREN ACTUALLY SLAVES UNDER FACTORY
SYSTEM—REFORM OF 1833—OASTLER AGAINST THE CHILD
SLAVERY—“JUVENILE LABOUR IN FACTORIES IS A NATIONAL
BLESSING”.
The cannibalistic stage has passed and the day of sacrifice has
passed—no longer is the child frankly a convenience nor is its life,
as a result of past economic stress, a lightly considered trifle to be
tossed into the cauldron of religious ceremony. Philosophy, humanity,
civilization, and religion have combined to make the life of the child
safe.
With what result?
The general belief that children were not regularly employed until
the middle of the last century, when the factory system arose, had
led to the equally erroneous belief that it was in the factory where
the industrial abuse of children was first practised. In France where
there was little industrial use for children in the large centres of
population, where in other words children did not pay, the problem
of modern humanity was to save infants from exposure and death. In
England where there was an industrial use for them from early times,
and where from the earliest times there are records of their abuse,
there was no necessity for measures to protect them from infanticidal
tendencies. But it is in England that we must study the ill-treatment
of children that was brought about by the desire to make them useful.
The industrial records of the Middle Ages contain but few
references[438] to children, for the adults were busy with their own
troubles. One of the first of these notices was an order issued by the
famous Richard Whittington, in 1398, and, although it is mixed with
other considerations, it shows the human spark. It reads:
“ORDINANCES OF THE HURERS.
“_22 Richard II., A.D. 1398. Letter-Book H., fol.
cccxviii. (Norman French)._
“On the 20th day of August, in the 22d year, etc., the following
Articles of the trade of Hurers were by Richard Whityngtone, Mayor, and
the Aldermen, ordered to be entered.—
“In the first place,—that no one of the said trade shall scour a
_cappe_ or _hure_, or anything pertaining to _scouryng_, belonging to
the said trade, in any open place: but they must do this in their own
houses; seeing that some persons in the said trade have of late sent
their apprentices and journeymen as well as children of tender age and
others, down to the water of Thames and other exposed places, and amid
horrible tempests, frosts, and snows, to the very great scandal, as
well of the good folks of the said trade, as of the City aforesaid.
And also, because of that divers persons, and pages belonging to
lords, when they take their horses down to the Thames, are often-times
wrangling with their said apprentices and journeymen; and they are then
on the point of killing one another, to the very great peril that seems
likely to ensue therefrom.”[439]
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the peasants were the
villeins of the owners of the land and held their small farms in return
for the work done, the work of children was contracted for, “the lord
very frequently demanding the labour of the whole family, with the
exception of the housewife.”[440]
Nearly all the trades and manufactures in the Middle Ages were under
the control of the guilds, so that almost all of the children working,
excepting those on farms or in domestic service, came under their
supervision. The attitude of the guilds toward child labour is shown
in the regulations of the apprenticeships, but this interest was
mainly industrial, for in regulating the work of the children they
protected their members from cheap labour and at the same time, by
their supervision over the work of the rising generation, saw that the
guild’s reputation for the proper kind of labour was kept up and prices
therefore held to a desirable level.[441]
At the same time there was a religious side to the guilds, a strong
religious side, and while everything they did, such as the prohibition
of night work (not out of consideration of the health of the workers
but because it might lead to bad work),[442] had a purely industrial
aspect, there is no doubt that this social and religious side developed
in the guilds and their members an outlook on the broader and more
humane aspects of their own place in society. The custom of not
permitting a man to employ other than his own wedded wife and his own
daughter was not humanitarian in its intention but its effect could not
be other than beneficial.
“No one of the said trade,” said the ordinances of the Braelers (makers
of braces) in 1355, “shall be so daring as to work at his trade at
night ... also, that no one of the said trade shall be so daring as to
set any woman to work in his trade, other than his wedded wife, or his
daughter.”[443]
In 1562 the Statute of Artificers was passed, regulating the system of
apprenticeship which had hitherto been a matter of regulation only
among the guilds themselves. The national sanction thereby given to the
apprentice system meant much and had a great influence in the years to
come. The chief features of the Act, binding by indenture, registration
of the agreement, and a minimum term of seven years on the indoor
system, led to the master’s entire control of the boy and up to 1814
affected the relationships of the child employed or otherwise under the
control of an employer.
Coincident with the development of the interest in the child as an
industrial factor arose the interest in the child as a charge on the
State, a phase of the child question that in the ancient civilizations
had found its answer mainly in the toleration of infanticide. The
Common Council of London on September 27, 1556, passed an Act, the
following extract from which will go to show that there was then an
attempt to go back of the child problem and an endeavour to regulate
marriage.
“FORASMUCHE AS great pouertie, penurye and lacke of lyvynge hathe of
late yeres by dyverse and soundrye occasyons wayes and meanes arysen
growen and encreased within this Cytye of London not onelye amongste
the pore artyficers and handye craftes men of the same Cytie but also
amongest other Cytezens of suche Companyes as in tymes paste have
lyved and prosperouslye and in greate wealthe and one of the Chiefeste
occasyons thereof (as it is thought and semeth to all men who by
longe tyme have knowne the same Cytie and have had experyence of the
state thereof) is by reason of the ouer hastie mariages and ouer soone
setting vpp of howsholdes of and by the youthe and yonge folkes of the
saide Cytye whiche have commenlye vsyd and yet do to marye themselues
as soone as euer they comme out of their Apprentycehood be they neuer
so yonge and unskyllfull....”[444]
In the time of Henry VIII. an attempt was made to take care of the
question of the growing number of vagrant children by making all
vagrant children between the years of five and fourteen liable to be
bound out to some master as apprentices, the boys until they were
twenty-four and the girls until they were twenty.[445]
In 1601 a statute was passed which gave to justices of the peace the
power of apprenticing not only the children of paupers and vagrants but
the children of those parents who were overburdened with children and
who were unable to support them.
“AND be it further enacted that it shalbe lawfull for the saide
churchwardens and overseers, or the greater parte of them, by the
assent of any two justices of the peace aforesaid, to binde any
suche children as aforesaide to be apprentices, where they shall see
convenient, till suche man child shall come to the age of fower and
twentie yeares, and such woman child to the age of one and twenty
yeares, or the tyme of her mariage; the same to be as effectuall to
all purposes as if suche childe were of full age, and by indenture of
covenant bounde hym or her selfe.”[446]
In the seventeenth century, the practice of putting children
prematurely to work prevailed to an extent which, when compared with
the extent of the manufacturing system, “seems almost incredible,” says
Macaulay.[447]
A little creature of six years old was thought fit for labour in
the town of Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade. Writers
at that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently
benevolent,[448] mention, “with exultation, the fact that in that
single city boys and girls of tender age created wealth exceeding what
was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a
year.”
[Illustration: INFANT TOILERS IN A SILK MILL, SYRIA
(COPYRIGHT BY UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, N. Y.)]
[Illustration: A HEALTHY PAIR OF INDIAN CHILDREN, WESTERN CANADA]
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century was sudden and
violent. All the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright, and Boulton were
made within twenty years, steam was applied to the new looms, and
the modern factory system had fairly begun.[449] With the demand for
labourers and the fact that the division of labour brought about a call
for low-priced workmen, some of the divisions really necessitating no
greater intelligence than that of a child, the children were in great
demand.
It was here that the Statute of Artificers assisted in the crushing
industrial conditions, for the overseers of the poor became the agents
of the mill-owners and arranged for days when the pauper children could
be inspected and selected for the factory work. When the selections
had been made, the children were conveyed by canal boats and wagons
to the destination, and then their slavery began. Sometimes men who
made a business of trafficking in children would transfer them to
a factory district where they were kept in a dark cellar until the
mill-owner, in want of hands, came to look them over and pick out
those that he thought would be useful. Nominally the children were
apprentices, but actually they were slaves and their treatment was most
inhuman. The parish authorities, in order to get rid of the imbeciles,
often bargained that the mill-owners take one idiot with every twenty
children. What became of the idiots after they had passed into the
hands of the capitalist is not known, but in most cases they did not
last long and mysteriously disappeared.
No matter what the conditions and no matter how ill the children, they
were worked without any visible vestige of human feeling. Even as late
as 1840 in the evidence given before the Select Committee investigating
the conditions of factories after the passage of the Reform Act of
1833, these were the conditions that the inspectors reported:
Q. “Have you many lace-mills in your district?”
A. “I have about thirty mills.”
Q. “What are the usual hours of work in these mills?”
A. “The usual hours are, about Nottingham, _twenty hours a day_, being
from four o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night; about
Chesterfield, the report I have had from the superintendent is, that
they work twenty-four hours, all through the night, in several mills
there.”
Q. “Are there many children and young persons in those mills?”
A. “The proportion is less in lace-mills than in others, but it is
necessary to have some of them; the process of winding and preparing
the bobbins and carriages requires children; those that I saw so
employed were _from ten to fifteen years of age_.”
Q. “Are the children detained in the mills during a considerable period
of the day and night?”
A. “I can speak from information derived from two or three mill-owners,
and also more extensively from reports by one of the superintendents
in my district; and I should say that in most of the mills they do
detain them at night; in some of them, the report states that they are
detained all night, in order to be ready when wanted.”
Q. “Are the children that are so detained liable to be detained
throughout the day, and do they sometimes begin their work at twelve
o’clock at night?”
A. “In the mills at Nottingham there are owners that make it a rule
that they will not keep the children after eight, or nine, or ten
o’clock, according to the inclination of the mill-occupier.”
Q. “Where are those children during the time they are detained in the
mill?”
A. “_When detained at night, and not employed I am told they are lying
about on the floor._”
Q. “Is it customary to close at eight on Saturday evening in the
lace-mills?”
A. “I think it is.”
Q. “How then do they compensate for the loss of those four hours work
in those mills?”
A. “_By working all night on Friday_; those are the mills in which they
pay so much for their power.”
Q. “Must not there be a considerable wear and tear upon the physical
constitution of children who are kept in this state?”
A. “I think it is self-evident.”
Q. “Is there any possibility of their obtaining education under those
circumstances?”
A. “None whatever, except on Sundays.”
Q. “But, after one hundred and twenty hours’ work in the week, is it
possible that they can have much capacity for study on Sunday?”
A. “It is not always that the same children are kept twenty hours,
because some mills have two complete sets of hands for their machinery,
and they work the same set of hands only ten hours.”
Q. “But, even under those circumstances, it must frequently happen that
the same children are employed during the night twice or thrice in the
course of a week?”
A. “The practice generally is that they take the night-work for one
week, and then the next week the morning-work.”
Q. “So that during one whole week they are employed in the night-work?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “At the end of a week, during which they have been employed in the
night, do you think that they have much capacity left for study on
Sunday?”
A. “No; my opinion is most decidedly that either turning out at four
o’clock in the morning, or being kept out of bed at night, must be
injurious to children, both to their physical constitution and their
mental powers.”
Q. “The law, as it stands, does not prevent the children from being
employed even twenty hours?”
A. “It does not apply to lace-mills.”
Q. “Therefore the period during which the child is employed depends
upon the varying humanity of the individual proprietor of the mill?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “You say that it sometimes happens that the children come to the
mill at five in the morning, and do not leave it till ten at night?”
A. “It is reported to me that it does so happen about Chesterfield.”
Q. “If a child is kept in winter till twelve o’clock at night, and has
then to go home and return to the factory in the morning, a distance of
two miles, does not he undergo fearful hardships?”
A. “Certainly.”[450]
The children who were apprenticed out to the mill-owners were fed on
the coarsest kind of food and in the most disgusting way. They slept
by turns, in relays, in beds that were never aired, for one set of
children were turned into the beds as soon as another set had been
driven out to their long and filthy toil. Some tried to run away and
after that they were worked with chains around their ankles; many died
and the little graves were unmarked in a desolate spot lest the number
of the dead attract too much attention.
Sixteen hours a day, six days a week, was no uncommon time for
children, and on Sunday they worked to clean the machine.
“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.”[451]
The agitation against these conditions led, in 1802, to an Act being
passed by the influence of Sir Robert Peel for the preservation of the
health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and
other mills.
The immediate cause of this was the fearful spread through the
factories in the Manchester district of epidemic diseases due to
overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation,
among the working people and especially among the children.
As far as reforming the conditions in which the children lived, the
Act, however, was a dead letter, and in a debate introduced by Sir
Robert Peel on June 6, 1815, one speaker, Horner, told of the sale of a
gang of children with the effects of a bankrupt.
“A still more atrocious instance,” continued the speaker, “had been
brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years ago, when a number
of these boys apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer had
been transferred (_i. e._, sold) to another and had been found by some
benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine.”[452]
No longer could people ignore conditions such as these and a Select
Committee of the House of Commons was empowered to take evidence on
the state of children working in the manufactories of Great Britain.
Despite the horrible nature of the evidence, when the Act resulting
from the investigation was passed, all that it did was to make nine
years the limit to age employment and twelve hours a day the working
day for those under sixteen years. But it was limited in effect to
cotton factories only, leaving the woollen and worsted factories
absolutely untouched, and even in the matter of the cotton factories
these provisions were frequently avoided.
Conditions continued to become worse instead of better, children of
both sexes being beaten and overworked to make profit for the rich
capitalists until 1830, when Richard Oastler, who had led in the fight
against black slavery, had his attention called to the conditions under
which the children of England were practically enslaved.[453]
Oastler was talking one night about his slavery reforms to a friend
near Bradford and the remark was made to him: “I wonder you never
turned your attention to the factory.” “Why should I?” replied the
young abolitionist, “I have nothing to do with factories.” “Perhaps
not,” was the answer, “but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in
the West Indies and I assure you that there are cruelties practised in
our mills on little children which I am sure if you knew you would try
to prevent.”
The man who gave this suggestion, John Wood, was himself an owner of
a mill and he admitted to Oastler that in his own mill the little
children were worked from six in the morning until seven at night with
a break of only forty minutes for lunch and that various devices,
including beatings with sticks and straps and clubs, were employed to
goad them on to renewed labour.
The very next day Oastler began a crusade which lasted for many weary
years. He succeeded in interesting J. Hobhouse and M. T. Sadler, both
members of the House of Commons, and the ten hours agitation began
in and out of Parliament. In the course of a speech delivered in
March, 1832, in favour of the ten hours bill, Sadler declared that so
great was the demand in some districts for children’s labour that “an
indispensable condition of marriage among the working classes was the
certainty of offspring whose wages, beginning at six years old, might
keep their inhuman fathers and mothers in idleness.”
“Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible,” exclaimed Sadler,
“posterity will not believe it true—that a generation of Englishmen
could exist, or had existed, that would work lisping infancy a few
summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by
its unresisting weakness, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours
a day, and through the weary night also, till in the dewy morn of
existence, the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded.”
But, to the nation’s eternal disgrace, that generation of Englishmen
did exist, and Mr. Sadler told the House, detail by detail, of the
evils and outrages of the whole abominable system. Excessive hours,
low wages, immorality, ill-health—all were enumerated, and then he
continued:
“Then in order to keep them awake, to stimulate their exertions, means
are made use of to which I shall now advert, as a last instance of
the degradation to which this system has reduced the manufacturing
operatives of this country. Children are beaten with thongs, prepared
for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether
children or grown up, and I hardly know which is the more disgusting
outrage, are beaten, beaten in your free market of labour as you term
it, like slaves. The poor wretch is flogged before its companions,
flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with
execration of the cartwhip of the West Indies, but let us see this
night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong in England.”[454]
Interesting too was the fact brought out at this time that while these
were the conditions in England, in the colonies black labour was
protected to the extent that nine hours a day was the legal day for
adults and young persons and children were not allowed to work more
than six, while night work was simply prohibited.
The investigation of the Sadler Committee evoked the interesting
information from one witness that children were never employed if they
were under five.
The attitude of the employers toward the agitation can be best judged
from the following extracts:
“Every man acquainted with the political history of the last century
must know, that the labour of children was actually pointed out to
the manufacturers by Mr. William Pitt, as a new resource by which
they might be enabled to bear the additional load of taxation which
the necessities of the State compelled him to impose. The necessity
for labour created by this taxation has not yet abated; because the
immense capital taken away by the enormous expenditure of the great
wars arising out of the French Revolution, an expenditure which was
mainly supported out of the industrial resources of the country, has
not been replaced. But even independent of these considerations,
and irrespective of a past which can never be recalled, we mean to
assert, as we have done elsewhere, in broad terms and the plainest
language, that the infant labour, as it is erroneously called—or the
juvenile labour, as it should be called—in factories, is in fact a
national blessing, and absolutely necessary for the support of the
manifold fiscal burthens which have been placed upon the industry of
this country. It is quite sufficient to say that the children of the
operatives have mouths, and must be fed; they have limbs, and must be
clothed; they have minds, which ought to be instructed; and they have
passions, which must be controlled. Now, if the parents are unable
to provide these requisites, and their inability to do so is just as
notorious as their existence, it becomes absolutely necessary that
the children should aid in obtaining them for themselves. To abolish
juvenile labour, is plainly nothing else than to abolish juvenile means
of support; and to confine it within very narrow limits, is just to
subtract a dinner or a supper from the unhappy objects of mistaken
benevolence.”[455]
The result of all this agitation and debate was the famous Act of 1833
introduced by Lord Shaftesbury which prohibited night work to persons
under eighteen in cotton, woollen, and other factories, and provided
that children from nine to thirteen years of age were not to work more
than forty-eight hours a week and those from thirteen to eighteen not
to work more than sixty-eight hours. Children under nine were not to be
employed at all.
Even this much was not obtained until Oastler had succeeded in driving
home to the British mind conditions such as are described in a speech
delivered at Huddersfield, December 26, 1831, of which the following is
an extract:
“I will not picture fiction to you,” said Oastler, in the early days
of the factory movement, “but I will tell you what I have seen. Take
a little female captive, six or seven years old; she shall rise from
her bed at four in the morning of a cold winter day, but before she
rises she wakes perhaps half a dozen times, and says, ‘Father, is it
time? Father, is it time?’ And at last, when she gets up and puts her
little bits of rags upon her weary limbs—weary yet with the last day’s
work—she leaves her parents in their bed, for their labour (if they
have any) is not required so early. She trudges alone through rain
and snow, and mire and darkness, to the mill, and there for thirteen,
fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen hours is she obliged to
work with only thirty minutes’ interval for meals and play. Homeward
again at night she would go, when she was able, but many a time she hid
herself in the wool in the mill, as she had not strength to go. And if
she were one moment behind the appointed time; if the bell had ceased
to ring when she arrived with trembling, shivering, weary limbs at the
factory door, there stood a monster in human form, and as she passed
he lashed her. This,” he continued, holding up an overlooker’s strap,
“is no fiction. It was hard at work in this town last week. The girl
I am speaking of died; but she dragged on that dreadful existence for
several years.”[456]
While Oastler was delivering this speech and these conditions were
rife, Malthus was revising the first edition of his _Essay on
Population_.