In dealing now with the more important branches of the English
manufacturing proletariat, we shall begin, according to the principle
already laid down, with the factory-workers, _i.e_., those who are
comprised under the Factory Act. This law regulates the length of the
working-day in mills in which wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or
woven by means of water or steam-power, and embraces, therefore, the more
important branches of English manufacture. The class employed by them is
the most intelligent and energetic of all the English workers, and,
therefore, the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie. It
stands as a whole, and the cotton-workers pre-eminently stand, at the
head of the labour movement, as their masters the manufacturers,
especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation.
We have already seen in the introduction how the population employed in
working up the textile materials were first torn from their former way of
life. It is, therefore, not surprising that the progress of mechanical
invention in later years also affected precisely these workers most
deeply and permanently. The history of cotton manufacture as related by
Ure, {134a} Baines, {134b} and others is the story of improvements in
every direction, most of which have become domesticated in the other
branches of industry as well. Hand-work is superseded by machine-work
almost universally, nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of
steam or water, and every year is bringing further improvements.
In a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only be a
source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the
benefit for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means of
subsistence. Every improvement in machinery throws workers out of
employment, and the greater the advance, the more numerous the
unemployed; each great improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of
workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness,
and crime. Take a few examples. The very first invention, the jenny,
worked by one man, produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel had
yielded in the same time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners out of
employment. The throstle, which, in turn, produced much more than the
jenny, and like it, was worked by one man, threw still more people out of
employment. The mule, which required yet fewer hands in proportion to
the product, had the same effect, and every improvement in the mule,
every multiplication of its spindles, diminished still further the number
of workers employed. But this increase of the number of spindles in the
mule is so great that whole armies of workers have been thrown out of
employment by it. For, whereas one spinner, with a couple of children
for piecers, formerly set six hundred spindles in motion, he could now
manage fourteen hundred to two thousand spindles upon two mules, so that
two adult spinners and a part of the piecers whom they employed were
thrown out. And since self-acting mules have been introduced into a very
large number of spinning-mills, the spinners' work is wholly performed by
the machine. There lies before me a book from the pen of James Leach,
{135} one of the recognised leaders of the Chartists in Manchester. The
author has worked for years in various branches of industry, in mills and
coal mines, and is known to me personally as an honest, trustworthy, and
capable man. In consequence of his political position, he had at command
extensive detailed information as to the different factories, collected
by the workers themselves, and he publishes tables from which it is clear
that in 1841, in 35 factories, 1,060 fewer mule spinners were employed
than in 1829, though the number of spindles in these 35 factories had
increased by 99,239. He cites five factories in which no spinners
whatever are employed, self-actors only being used. While the number of
spindles increased by 10 per cent., the number of spinners diminished
more than 60 per cent. And Leach adds that since 1841, so many
improvements have been introduced by double-decking and other means, that
in some of the factories named, half the operatives have been discharged.
In one factory alone, where eighty spinners were employed a short time
ago, there are now but twenty left; the others having been discharged or
set at children's work for children's wages. Of Stockport Leach tells a
similar story, that in 1835, 800 spinners were employed, and in 1840 but
140, though the manufacture of Stockport has greatly increased during the
last eight or nine years. Similar improvements have now been made in
carding frames, by which one-half the operatives have been thrown out of
employment. In one factory improved frames have been set up, which have
thrown four hands out of eight out of work, besides which the employer
reduced the wages of the four retained from eight shillings to seven. The
same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has
taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since
it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two
looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people. And in all sorts
of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is
the same. The power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate one branch
after another of wool and linen-weaving; in Rochdale alone, there are
more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches.
The bourgeoisie usually replies to this, that improvements in machinery,
by decreasing the cost of production, supply finished goods at lower
prices, and that these reduced prices cause such an increase in
consumption that the unemployed operatives soon find full employment in
newly-founded factories. {136} The bourgeoisie is so far correct that
under certain conditions favourable for the general development of
manufacture, every reduction in price of goods _in which the raw material
is cheap_, greatly increases consumption, and gives rise to the building
of new factories; but every further word of the assertion is a lie. The
bourgeoisie ignores the fact that it takes years for these results of the
decrease in price to follow and for new factories to be built; it is
silent upon the point that every improvement in machinery throws the real
work, the expenditure of force, more and more upon the machine, and so
transforms the work of full-grown men into mere supervision, which a
feeble woman or even a child can do quite as well, and does for half or
two-thirds wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly more and more
supplanted and _not re-employed_ by the increase in manufacture; it
conceals the fact that whole branches of industry fall away, or are so
changed that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care not to
confess what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of forbidding
the work of children is broached, that factory-work must be learned in
earliest youth in order to be learned properly. It does not mention the
fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon
as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch,
if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him,
and with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for
winning his bread. But the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the
improvements in machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up
money during the first years while many old machines are still in use,
and the improvement not yet universally introduced; and it would be too
much to ask that it should have an open eye for the disadvantages
inseparable from these improvements.
The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently
disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the
working-men. The bourgeoisie insists that although the price of piece-
work has been reduced, yet the total of wages for the week's work has
rather risen than fallen, and the condition of the operatives rather
improved than deteriorated. It is hard to get to the bottom of the
matter, for the operatives usually dwell upon the price of piece-work.
But it is certain that the weekly wage, also, has, in many branches of
work, been reduced by the improvement of machinery. The so-called fine
spinners (who spin fine mule yarn), for instance, do receive high wages,
thirty to forty shillings a week, because they have a powerful
association for keeping wages up, and their craft requires long training;
but the coarse spinners who have to compete against self-actors (which
are not as yet adapted for fine spinning), and whose association was
broken down by the introduction of these machines, receive very low
wages. A mule spinner told me that he does not earn more than fourteen
shillings a week, and his statement agrees with that of Leach, that in
various factories the coarse spinners earn less than sixteen shillings
and sixpence a week, and that a spinner, who years ago earned thirty
shillings, can now hardly scrape up twelve and a half, and had not earned
more on an average in the past year. The wages of women and children may
perhaps have fallen less, but only because they were not high from the
beginning. I know several women, widows with children, who have trouble
enough to earn eight to nine shillings a week; and that they and their
families cannot live decently upon that sum, every one must admit who
knows the price of the barest necessaries of life in England. That wages
in general have been reduced by the improvement of machinery is the
unanimous testimony of the operatives. The bourgeois assertion that the
condition of the working-class has been improved by machinery is most
vigorously proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men in the
factory districts. And even if it were true that the relative wage, the
price of piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage, the sum to
be earned in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow? That the
operatives have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers filled
their purses from every improvement without giving the hands the smallest
share in the gain. The bourgeois forgets, in fighting the working-man,
the most ordinary principles of his own Political Economy. He who at
other times swears by Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the
workers: "Where could the millions by which the population of England has
increased find work, without the improvements in machinery?" {138} As
though the bourgeois did not know well enough that without machinery and
the expansion of industry which it produced, these "millions" would never
have been brought into the world and grown up! The service which
machinery has rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought
home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which
machinery shall no longer work against but for them. Let the wise
bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and
elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose
have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and
shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he
will see how many will answer: "Mill-hands thrown out of work by
machinery." The consequences of improvement in machinery under our
present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and
often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it
loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England
where, without that, there is usually a "surplus population," to be
discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And
what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position
in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must
exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To
escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and
outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general
demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge
in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of
uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken
of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of
despair.
The worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against
a machine that is making its way. The price of the goods which they
produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine,
and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the
lowest wages. The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an
old machine in competition with later improvements. And who else is
there to bear the hardship? The manufacturer will not throw out his old
apparatus, nor will he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead
mechanism he can make nothing, so he fastens upon the living worker, the
universal scapegoat of society. Of all the workers in competition with
machinery, the most ill-used are the hand-loom cotton weavers. They
receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a
position to earn more than ten shillings a week. One class of woven
goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the
last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so
that the trade is always overcrowded. Hence it comes that, in average
seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or
seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom
fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most woven goods require moreover a
damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part, for this
reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying
for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are usually without
wooden or paved floors. I have been in many dwellings of such weavers,
in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars. Often
half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live
together in a cottage with one or two workrooms, and one large sleeping-
room. Their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps
oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat. Great numbers of
them are Irish or of Irish descent. And these poor hand-loom weavers,
first to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must
serve the bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory
system. "See," cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, "see how these poor
creatures must famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and _then_
judge the factory {140} system!" As though it were not precisely the
factory system and the machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully
crushed the hand-loom weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know
this quite as well as ourselves! But the bourgeoisie has interests at
stake, and so a falsehood or two and a bit of hypocrisy won't matter
much.
Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and
more supersedes the work of men. The human labour, involved in both
spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the
machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but
only flexibility of finger. Men are, therefore, not only not needed for
it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the
hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore,
naturally almost superseded by them. Hence, the more the use of the
arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or water-
power, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work
more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their
places. In the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost
exclusive possession of the throstles; among the mules one man, an adult
spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes superfluous), and several
piecers for tying the threads, usually children or women, sometimes young
men of from eighteen to twenty years, here and there an old spinner {141}
thrown out of other employment. At the power-looms women, from fifteen
to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however,
rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. Among the
preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and
there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. Besides all these,
the factories employ numbers of children--doffers--for mounting and
taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an
engineer for the steam-engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual
work of the mills is done by women and children. This the manufacturers
deny.
They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does
not supersede adult male operatives. According to these tables, rather
more than half of all the factory-workers employed, _viz_., 52 per cent.,
were females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives more than
half were over eighteen years old. So far, so good. But the
manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the adults
were men and how many women. And this is just the point. Besides this,
they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the
men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and
still they have not the courage to tell the whole truth. These
publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions, crooked
statements, with calculations of averages, that prove a great deal for
the uninitiated reader and nothing for the initiated, and with
suppressions of facts bearing on the most important points; and they
prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of the
manufacturers concerned. Let us take some of the statements of a speech
with which Lord Ashley introduced the Ten Hours' Bill, March 15th, 1844,
into the House of Commons. Here he gives some data as to the relations
of sex and age of the operatives, not yet refuted by the manufacturers,
whose statements, as quoted above, cover moreover only a part of the
manufacturing industry of England. Of 419,560 factory operatives of the
British Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were under eighteen
years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, of whom 112,192 were less
than eighteen years old. There remain, therefore, 80,695 male operatives
under eighteen years, and 96,569 adult male operatives, _or not one full
quarter_ of the whole number. In the cotton factories, 56.25 per cent.;
in the woollen mills, 69.5 per cent.; in the silk mills, 70.5 per cent.;
in the flax-spinning mills, 70.5 per cent. of all operatives are of the
female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult
males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact
confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing
social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous
consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up
the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day
in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or
elsewhere, what becomes of the children? They grow up like wild weeds;
they are put out to nurse for a shilling or eighteenpence a week, and how
they are treated may be imagined. Hence the accidents to which little
children fall victims multiply in the factory districts to a terrible
extent. The lists of the Coroner of Manchester {143a} showed for nine
months: 69 deaths from burning, 56 from drowning, 23 from falling, 77
from other causes, or a total of 225 {143b} deaths from accidents, while
in non-manufacturing Liverpool during twelve months there were but 146
fatal accidents. The mining accidents are excluded in both cases; and
since the Coroner of Manchester has no authority in Salford, the
population of both places mentioned in the comparison is about the same.
The _Manchester Guardian_ reports one or more deaths by burning in almost
every number. That the general mortality among young children must be
increased by the employment of the mothers is self-evident, and is placed
beyond all doubt by notorious facts. Women often return to the mill
three or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the
dinner hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something, and
what sort of suckling that can be is also evident. Lord Ashley repeats
the testimony of several workwomen: "M. H., twenty years old, has two
children, the youngest a baby, that is tended by the other, a little
older. The mother goes to the mill shortly after five o'clock in the
morning, and comes home at eight at night; all day the milk pours from
her breasts, so that her clothing drips with it." "H. W. has three
children, goes away Monday morning at five o'clock, and comes back
Saturday evening; has so much to do for the children then that she cannot
get to bed before three o'clock in the morning; often wet through to the
skin, and obliged to work in that state." She said: "My breasts have
given me the most frightful pain, and I have been dripping wet with
milk." The use of narcotics to keep the children still is fostered by
this infamous system, and has reached a great extent in the factory
districts. Dr. Johns, Registrar in Chief for Manchester, is of opinion
that this custom is the chief source of the many deaths from convulsions.
The employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity,
and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the
family, brings the most demoralising consequences for parents as well as
children. A mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child,
to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during its first
year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child,
must inevitably grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a
stranger. The children who grow up under such conditions are utterly
ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which
they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to
isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general
undermining of the family in the working-class. A similar dissolution of
the family is brought about by the employment of the children. When they
get on far enough to earn more than they cost their parents from week to
week, they begin to pay the parents a fixed sum for board and lodging,
and keep the rest for themselves. This often happens from the fourteenth
or fifteenth year. {144} In a word, the children emancipate themselves,
and regard the paternal dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often
exchange for another, as suits them.
In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the
wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband
sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case
happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could
be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. It is easy to imagine the
wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations
within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged.
There lies before me a letter from an English working-man, Robert
Pounder, Baron's Buildings, Woodhouse, Moorside, in Leeds (the
bourgeoisie may hunt him up there; I give the exact address for the
purpose), written by him to Oastler: {145}
He relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to St. Helens,
in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend. He found him in a
miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend went
in, there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, think you? why he
sat and mended his wife's stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he
saw his old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide them. But Joe,
that is my friend's name, had seen it, and said: "Jack, what the devil
art thou doing? Where is the missus? Why, is that thy work?" and poor
Jack was ashamed, and said: "No, I know this is not my work, but my poor
missus is i' th' factory; she has to leave at half-past five and works
till eight at night, and then she is so knocked up that she cannot do
aught when she gets home, so I have to do everything for her what I can,
for I have no work, nor had any for more nor three years, and I shall
never have any more work while I live;" and then he wept a big tear. Jack
again said: "There is work enough for women folks and childer hereabouts,
but none for men; thou mayest sooner find a hundred pound on the road
than work for men--but I should never have believed that either thou or
any one else would have seen me mending my wife's stockings, for it is
bad work. But she can hardly stand on her feet; I am afraid she will be
laid up, and then I don't know what is to become of us, for it's a good
bit that she has been the man in the house and I the woman; it is bad
work, Joe;" and he cried bitterly, and said, "It has not been always so."
"No," said Joe; "but when thou hadn't no work, how hast thou not
shifted?" "I'll tell thee, Joe, as well as I can, but it was bad enough;
thou knowest when I got married I had work plenty, and thou knows I was
not lazy." "No, that thou wert not." "And we had a good furnished
house, and Mary need not go to work. I could work for the two of us; but
now the world is upside down. Mary has to work and I have to stop at
home, mind the childer sweep and wash, bake and mend; and, when the poor
woman comes home at night, she is knocked up. Thou knows, Joe, it's hard
for one that was used different." "Yes, boy, it is hard." And then Jack
began to cry again, and he wished he had never married, and that he had
never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed Mary, that it
would come to this. "I have often cried over it," said Jack. Now when
Joe heard this, he told me that he had cursed and damned the factories,
and the masters, and the Government, with all the curses that he had
learned while he was in the factory from a child.
Can any one imagine a more insane state of things than that described in
this letter? And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes
from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man
true womanliness, or the woman true manliness--this condition which
degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them,
Humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation, the final
achievement of all the efforts and struggles of hundreds of generations
to improve their own situation and that of their posterity. We must
either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when we see all our
labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit that human
society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must admit
that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to
pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the
beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably
brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the
husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If the wife can now
base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay,
the whole of the common possession, the necessary inference is that this
community of possession is no true and rational one, since one member of
the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share. If the
family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution
merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not
family affection, but private interest lurking under the cloak of a
pretended community of possessions. The same relation exists on the part
of those children who support unemployed parents {147a} when they do not
directly pay board as already referred to. Dr. Hawkins testified in the
Factories' Inquiry Commission's Report that this relation is common
enough, and in Manchester it is notorious. In this case the children are
the masters in the house, as the wife was in the former case, and Lord
Ashley gives an example of this in his speech: {147b} A man berated his
two daughters for going to the public house, and they answered that they
were tired of being ordered about, saying, "Damn you, we have to keep
you!" Determined to keep the proceeds of their work for themselves, they
left the family dwelling, and abandoned their parents to their fate.
The unmarried women, who have grown up in mills, are no better off than
the married ones. It is self-evident that a girl who has worked in a
mill from her ninth year is in no position to understand domestic work,
whence it follows that female operatives prove wholly inexperienced and
unfit as housekeepers. They cannot knit or sew, cook or wash, are
unacquainted with the most ordinary duties of a housekeeper, and when
they have young children to take care of, have not the vaguest idea how
to set about it. The Factories' Inquiry Commission's Report gives dozens
of examples of this, and Dr. Hawkins, Commissioner for Lancashire,
expresses his opinion as follows: {147c}
"The girls marry early and recklessly; they have neither means, time,
nor opportunity to learn the ordinary duties of household life; but if
they had them all, they would find no time in married life for the
performance of these duties. The mother is more than twelve hours
away from her child daily; the baby is cared for by a young girl or an
old woman, to whom it is given to nurse. Besides this, the dwelling
of the mill-hands is too often no home but a cellar, which contains no
cooking or washing utensils, no sewing or mending materials, nothing
which makes life agreeable and civilised, or the domestic hearth
attractive. For these and other reasons, and especially for the sake
of the better chances of life for the little children, I can but wish
and hope that a time may come in which married women will be shut out
of the factories." {148a}
But that is the least of the evil. The moral consequences of the
employment of women in factories are even worse. The collecting of
persons of both sexes and all ages in a single workroom, the inevitable
contact, the crowding into a small space of people, to whom neither
mental nor moral education has been given, is not calculated for the
favourable development of the female character. The manufacturer, if he
pays any attention to the matter, can interfere only when something
scandalous actually happens; the permanent, less conspicuous influence of
persons of dissolute character, upon the more moral, and especially upon
the younger ones, he cannot ascertain, and consequently cannot prevent.
But precisely this influence is the most injurious. The language used in
the mills is characterised by many witnesses in the report of 1833, as
"indecent," "bad," "filthy," etc. {148b} It is the same process upon a
small scale which we have already witnessed upon a large one in the great
cities. The centralisation of population has the same influence upon the
same persons, whether it affects them in a great city or a small factory.
The smaller the mill the closer the packing, and the more unavoidable the
contact; and the consequences are not wanting. A witness in Leicester
said that he would rather let his daughter beg than go into a factory;
that they are perfect gates of hell; that most of the prostitutes of the
town had their employment in the mills to thank for their present
situation. {148c} Another, in Manchester, "did not hesitate to assert
that three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to
twenty years of age, were unchaste." {149a} Commissioner Cowell
expresses it as his opinion, that the morality of the factory operatives
is somewhat below the average of that of the working-class in general.
{149b} And Dr. Hawkins {149c} says:
"An estimate of sexual morality cannot readily be reduced to figures;
but if I may trust my own observations and the general opinion of
those with whom I have spoken, as well as the whole tenor of the
testimony furnished me, the aspect of the influence of factory life
upon the morality of the youthful female population is most
depressing."
It is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any
other, and to an even higher degree, confers the _jus primae noctis_ upon
the master. In this respect also the employer is sovereign over the
persons and charms of his employees. The threat of discharge suffices to
overcome all resistance in nine cases out of ten, if not in ninety-nine
out of a hundred, in girls who, in any case, have no strong inducements
to chastity. If the master is mean enough, and the official report
mentions several such cases, his mill is also his harem; and the fact
that not all manufacturers use their power, does not in the least change
the position of the girls. In the beginning of manufacturing industry,
when most of the employers were upstarts without education or
consideration for the hypocrisy of society, they let nothing interfere
with the exercise of their vested rights.
To form a correct judgment of the influence of factory-work upon the
health of the female sex, it is necessary first to consider the work of
children, and then the nature of the work itself. From the beginning of
manufacturing industry, children have been employed in mills, at first
almost exclusively by reason of the smallness of the machines, which were
later enlarged. Even children from the workhouses were employed in
multitudes, being rented out for a number of years to the manufacturers
as apprentices. They were lodged, fed, and clothed in common, and were,
of course, completely the slaves of their masters, by whom they were
treated with the utmost recklessness and barbarity. As early as 1796,
the public objection to this revolting system found such vigorous
expression through Dr. Percival and Sir Robert Peel (father of the
Cabinet Minister, and himself a cotton manufacturer), that in 1802
Parliament passed an Apprentices' Bill, by which the most crying evils
were removed. Gradually the increasing competition of free workpeople
crowded out the whole apprentice system; factories were built in cities,
machinery was constructed on a larger scale, and workrooms were made more
airy and wholesome; gradually, too, more work was found for adults and
young persons. The number of children in the mills diminished somewhat,
and the age at which they began to work rose a little; few children under
eight or nine years were now employed. Later, as we shall see, the power
of the State intervened several times to protect them from the
money-greed of the bourgeoisie.
The great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially
among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome
conditions under which they pass their first year. These influences are
at work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite so
powerfully as upon those who succumb. The result in the most favourable
case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development, and
consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution. A nine years old
child of a factory operative that has grown up in want, privation, and
changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient clothing and
unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working force of a child
brought up under healthier conditions. At nine years of age it is sent
into the mill to work 6.5 hours (formerly 8, earlier still, 12 to 14,
even 16 hours) daily, until the thirteenth year; then twelve hours until
the eighteenth year. The old enfeebling influences continue, while the
work is added to them. It is not to be denied that a child of nine
years, even an operative's child, can hold out through 6.5 hours' daily
work, without any one being able to trace visible bad results in its
development directly to this cause; but in no case can its presence in
the damp, heavy air of the factory, often at once warm and wet,
contribute to good health; and, in any case, it is unpardonable to
sacrifice to the greed of an unfeeling bourgeoisie the time of children
which should be devoted solely to their physical and mental development,
withdraw them from school and the fresh air, in order to wear them out
for the benefit of the manufacturers. The bourgeoisie says: "If we do
not employ the children in the mills, they only remain under conditions
unfavourable to their development;" and this is true, on the whole. But
what does this mean if it is not a confession that the bourgeoisie first
places the children of the working-class under unfavourable conditions,
and then exploits these bad conditions for its own benefit, appeals to
that which is as much its own fault as the factory system, excuses the
sin of to-day with the sin of yesterday? And if the Factory Act did not
in some measure fetter their hands, how this "humane," this "benevolent"
bourgeoisie, which has built its factories solely for the good of the
working-class, would take care of the interests of these workers! Let us
hear how they acted before the factory inspector was at their heels.
Their own admitted testimony shall convict them in the report of the
Factories' Inquiry Commission of 1833.
The report of the Central Commission relates that the manufacturers began
to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often of
seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often lasted
fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals; that the
manufacturers permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and
often took an active part in so doing themselves. One case is related of
a Scotch manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years old runaway, forced
him to return running after the employer as fast as the master's horse
trotted, and beat him the whole way with a long whip. {151} In the large
towns where the operatives resisted more vigorously, such things
naturally happened less often. But even this long working-day failed to
satisfy the greed of the capitalists. Their aim was to make the capital
invested in the building and machinery produce the highest return, by
every available means, to make it work as actively as possible. Hence
the manufacturers introduced the shameful system of night-work. Some of
them employed two sets of operatives, each numerous enough to fill the
whole mill, and let one set work the twelve hours of the day, and the
other twelve hours of the night. It is needless to picture the effect
upon the frames of young children, and even upon the health of young
persons and adults, produced by permanent loss of sleep at night, which
cannot be made good by any amount of sleep during the day. Irritation of
the whole nervous system, with general lassitude and enfeeblement of the
entire frame, were the inevitable results, with the fostering of
temptation to drunkenness and unbridled sexual indulgence. One
manufacturer testifies {152a} that during the two years in which night-
work was carried on in his factory, the number of illegitimate children
born was doubled, and such general demoralisation prevailed that he was
obliged to give up night-work. Other manufacturers were yet more
barbarous, requiring many hands to work thirty to forty hours at a
stretch, several times a week, letting them get a couple of hours sleep
only, because the night-shift was not complete, but calculated to replace
a part of the operatives only.
The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything
that is known to me in this line. Such infamies, as are here related,
are nowhere else to be found--yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie
constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own
favour. The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly
enough. The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared
before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours.
This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and
legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of Leeds:
{152b}
"I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones
before I came to Leeds. At first I thought it was rachitis, but I was
soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of patients
who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances of the
disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year) in
which children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by the
circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began
to work in the mills. Thus far I have seen about a hundred such
cases, and can, most decidedly, express the opinion that they are the
consequences of overwork. So far as I know they were all mill
children, and themselves attributed the evil to this cause. The
number of cases of curvature of the spine which have fallen under my
observation, and which were evidently consequent upon too protracted
standing, was not less than three hundred."
Precisely similar is the testimony of Dr. Ray, for eighteen years
physician in the hospital in Leeds: {153a}
"Malformations of the spine are very frequent among mill-hands; some
of them consequent upon mere overwork, others the effect of long work
upon constitutions originally feeble, or weakened by bad food.
Deformities seem even more frequent than these diseases; the knees
were bent inward, the ligaments very often relaxed and enfeebled, and
the long bones of the legs bent. The thick ends of these long bones
were especially apt to be bent and disproportionately developed, and
these patients came from the factories in which long work-hours were
of frequent occurrence."
Surgeons Beaumont and Sharp, of Bradford, bear the same testimony. The
reports of Drinkwater, Power, and Dr. Loudon contain a multitude of
examples of such distortions, and those of Tufnell and Sir David Barry,
which are less directed to this point, give single examples. {153b} The
Commissioners for Lancashire, Cowell, Tufnell, and Hawkins, have almost
wholly neglected this aspect of the physiological results of the factory
system, though this district rivals Yorkshire in the number of cripples.
I have seldom traversed Manchester without meeting three or four of them,
suffering from precisely the same distortions of the spinal columns and
legs as that described, and I have often been able to observe them
closely. I know one personally who corresponds exactly with the
foregoing description of Dr. Ray, and who got into this condition in Mr.
Douglas' factory in Pendleton, an establishment which enjoys an
unenviable notoriety among the operatives by reason of the former long
working periods continued night after night. It is evident, at a glance,
whence the distortions of these cripples come; they all look exactly
alike. The knees are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and
thick, and the spinal column often bent forwards or to one side. But the
crown belongs to the philanthropic manufacturers of the Macclesfield silk
district. They employed the youngest children of all, even from five to
six years of age. In the supplementary testimony of Commissioner
Tufnell, I find the statement of a certain factory manager Wright, both
of whose sisters were most shamefully crippled, and who had once counted
the cripples in several streets, some of them the cleanest and neatest
streets of Macclesfield. He found in Townley Street ten, George Street
five, Charlotte Street four, Watercots fifteen, Bank Top three, Lord
Street seven, Mill Lane twelve, Great George Street two, in the workhouse
two, Park Green one, Peckford Street two, whose families all unanimously
declared that the cripples had become such in consequence of overwork in
the silk-twisting mills. One boy is mentioned so crippled as not to be
able to go upstairs, and girls deformed in back and hips.
Other deformities also have proceeded from this overwork, especially
flattening of the foot, which Sir D. Barry {154a} frequently observed, as
did the physicians and surgeons in Leeds. {154b} In cases, in which a
stronger constitution, better food, and other more favourable
circumstances enabled the young operative to resist this effect of a
barbarous exploitation, we find, at least, pain in the back, hips, and
legs, swollen joints, varicose veins, and large, persistent ulcers in the
thighs and calves. These affections are almost universal among the
operatives. The reports of Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry contain
hundreds of examples; indeed, they know almost no operative who did not
suffer from some of these affections; and in the remaining reports, the
occurrence of the same phenomena is attested by many physicians. The
reports covering Scotland place it beyond all doubt, that a working-day
of thirteen hours, even for men and women from eighteen to twenty-two
years of age, produces at least these consequences, both in the
flax-spinning mills of Dundee and Dunfermline, and in the cotton mills of
Glasgow and Lanark.
All these affections are easily explained by the nature of factory-work,
which is, as the manufacturers say, very "light," and precisely by reason
of its lightness, more enervating than any other. The operatives have
little to do, but must stand the whole time. Any one who sits down, say
upon a window-ledge or a basket, is fined, and this perpetual upright
position, this constant mechanical pressure of the upper portions of the
body upon spinal column, hips, and legs, inevitably produces the results
mentioned. This standing is not required by the work itself, and at
Nottingham chairs have been introduced, with the result that these
affections disappeared, and the operatives ceased to object to the length
of the working-day. But in a factory where the operative works solely
for the bourgeois, and has small interest in doing his work well, he
would probably use the seats more than would be agreeable and profitable
to the manufacturer; and in order that somewhat less raw material may be
spoiled for the bourgeois, the operative must sacrifice health and
strength. {155} This long protracted upright position, with the bad
atmosphere prevalent in the mills, entails, besides the deformities
mentioned, a marked relaxation of all vital energies, and, in
consequence, all sorts of other affections general rather than local. The
atmosphere of the factories is, as a rule, at once damp and warm,
unusually warmer than is necessary, and, when the ventilation is not
_very_ good, impure, heavy, deficient in oxygen, filled with dust and the
smell of the machine oil, which almost everywhere smears the floor, sinks
into it, and becomes rancid. The operatives are lightly clad by reason
of the warmth, and would readily take cold in case of irregularity of the
temperature; a draught is distasteful to them, the general enervation
which gradually takes possession of all the physical functions diminishes
the animal warmth: this must be replaced from without, and nothing is
therefore more agreeable to the operative than to have all the doors and
windows closed, and to stay in his warm factory-air. Then comes the
sudden change of temperature on going out into the cold and wet or frosty
atmosphere, without the means of protection from the rain, or of changing
wet clothing for dry, a circumstance which perpetually produces colds.
And when one reflects that, with all this, not one single muscle of the
body is really exercised, really called into activity, except perhaps
those of the legs; that nothing whatsoever counteracts the enervating,
relaxing tendency of all these conditions; that every influence is
wanting which might give the muscles strength, the fibres elasticity and
consistency; that from youth up, the operative is deprived of all fresh
air recreation, it is impossible to wonder at the almost unanimous
testimony of the physicians in the Factories' Report, that they find a
great lack of ability to resist disease, a general depression in vital
activity, a constant relaxation of the mental and physical powers. Let
us hear Sir D. Barry first: {156}
"The unfavourable influences of mill-work upon the hands are the
following: (1) The inevitable necessity of forcing their mental and
bodily effort to keep pace with a machine moved by a uniform and
unceasing motive power. (2) Continuance in an upright position during
unnaturally long and quickly recurring periods. (3) Loss of sleep in
consequence of too long working-hours, pain in the legs, and general
physical derangement. To these are often added low, crowded, dusty,
or damp workrooms, impure air, a high temperature, and constant
perspiration. Hence the boys especially very soon and with but few
exceptions, lose the rosy freshness of childhood, and become paler and
thinner than other boys. Even the hand-weaver's bound boy, who sits
before his loom with his bare feet resting upon the clay-floor,
retains a fresher appearance, because he occasionally goes into the
fresh air for a time. But the mill child has not a moment free except
for meals, and never goes into the fresh air except on its way to
them. All adult male spinners are pale and thin, suffer from
capricious appetite and indigestion; and as they are all trained in
the mills from their youth up, and there are very few tall, athletic
men among them, the conclusion is justified that their occupation is
very unfavourable for the development of the male constitution;
females bear this work far better." (Very naturally. But we shall
see that they have their own diseases.)