"It appears in evidence that sometimes the sole consideration by
which parents are influenced in making choice of a person under
whom to place their children, is the amount of wages, not the mode
of treatment, to be secured to them."
If this is not enough to show that there were grounds for the
further protection, I will now refer to the same Report of the
Commissioners, to show, that from Scotland the details are full
as affecting, and even more disgusting. At page 18 (Report) the
Commissioners open with these words:
"Had the fact not been established by indubitable evidence,
everyone must have been slow to credit, that in this age and
country the proprietors of extensive factories could have been
indifferent to the well-being of their work-people to such a degree
as is implied in the following statements":
In page 41 an half-overseer gives this evidence:
"Does not like the long hours; he is very tired and hoarse at
night; and that some of the young female workers in his, the
spinning flat, have so swelled legs, one in particular, from
standing so long, about seventeen years old, that she can hardly
walk; that various of them have their feet bent in and their legs
crooked from the same cause."
In short, so universal is this complaint of "sair tired," and of
swelled legs, ankles, feet, hands, and arms, that it almost seems
as if one voice spoke the facts; for if we find them varied, it is
only here and there by touches like the above, so true to nature,
that one would think they must pierce even the most callous and
avaricious man to the very core. In one page we find a little child
of eight years old complaining that she is "sair tired" every
night, and has no time _for going to play_.
"That, at the age when children suffer these injuries from the
labour they undergo, they are not _free agents_, but are _let out
to hire_, the wages they earn being received and appropriated by
their parents and guardians, and therefore they think that a case
is made out for the interference of the legislature in behalf of
the children employed in factories"--p. 32.