We were compelled to deal with the factory system somewhat at length, as
it is an entirely novel creation of the industrial period; we shall be
able to treat the other workers the more briefly, because what has been
said either of the industrial proletariat in general, or of the factory
system in particular, will wholly, or in part, apply to them. We shall,
therefore, merely have to record how far the factory system has succeeded
in forcing its way into each branch of industry, and what other
peculiarities these may reveal.
The four branches comprised under the Factory Act are engaged in the
production of clothing stuffs. We shall do best if we deal next with
those workers who receive their materials from these factories; and,
first of all, with the stocking weavers of Nottingham, Derby, and
Leicester. Touching these workers, the Children's Employment Commission
reports that the long working-hours, imposed by low wages, with a
sedentary life and the strain upon the eyes involved in the nature of the
employment, usually enfeeble the whole frame, and especially the eyes.
Work at night is impossible without a very powerful light produced by
concentrating the rays of the lamp, making them pass through glass
globes, which is most injurious to the sight. At forty years of age,
nearly all wear spectacles. The children employed at spooling and
hemming usually suffer grave injuries to the health and constitution.
They work from the sixth, seventh, or eighth year ten to twelve hours
daily in small, close rooms. It is not uncommon for them to faint at
their work, to become too feeble for the most ordinary household
occupation, and so near-sighted as to be obliged to wear glasses during
childhood. Many were found by the commissioners to exhibit all the
symptoms of a scrofulous constitution, and the manufacturers usually
refuse to employ girls who have worked in this way as being too weak. The
condition of these children is characterised as "a disgrace to a
Christian country," and the wish expressed for legislative interference.
The Factory Report {189} adds that the stocking weavers are the worst
paid workers in Leicester, earning six, or with great effort, seven
shillings a week, for sixteen to eighteen hours' daily work. Formerly
they earned twenty to twenty-one shillings, but the introduction of
enlarged frames has ruined their business; the great majority still work
with old, small, single frames, and compete with difficulty with the
progress of machinery. Here, too, every progress is a disadvantage for
the workers. Nevertheless, Commissioner Power speaks of the pride of the
stocking weavers that they are free, and had no factory bell to measure
out the time for their eating, sleeping, and working. Their position to-
day is no better than in 1833, when the Factory Commission made the
foregoing statements, the competition of the Saxon stocking weavers, who
have scarcely anything to eat, takes care of that. This competition is
too strong for the English in nearly all foreign markets, and for the
lower qualities of goods even in the English market. It must be a source
of rejoicing for the patriotic German stocking weaver that his starvation
wages force his English brother to starve too! And, verily, will he not
starve on, proud and happy, for the greater glory of German industry,
since the honour of the Fatherland demands that his table should be bare,
his dish half empty? Ah! it is a noble thing this competition, this
"race of the nations." In the _Morning Chronicle_, another Liberal
sheet, the organ of the bourgeoisie par excellence, there were published
some letters from a stocking weaver in Hinckley, describing the condition
of his fellow-workers. Among other things, he reports 50 families, 321
persons, who were supported by 109 frames; each frame yielded on an
average 5.5 shillings; each family earned an average of 11s. 4d. weekly.
Out of this there was required for house rent, frame rent, fuel, light,
soap, and needles, together 5s. 10d., so that there remained for food,
per head daily, 1.5d., and for clothing nothing. "No eye," says the
stocking weaver, "has seen, no ear heard, and no heart felt the half of
the sufferings that these poor people endure." Beds were wanting either
wholly or in part, the children ran about ragged and barefoot; the men
said, with tears in their eyes: "It's a long time since we had any meat;
we have almost forgotten how it tastes;" and, finally, some of them
worked on Sunday, though public opinion pardons anything else more
readily than this, and the rattling noise of the frame is audible
throughout the neighbourhood. "But," said one of them, "look at my
children and ask no questions. My poverty forces me to it; I can't and
won't hear my children forever crying for bread, without trying the last
means of winning it honestly. Last Monday I got up at two in the morning
and worked to near midnight; the other days from six in the morning to
between eleven and twelve at night. I have had enough of it; I sha'n't
kill myself; so now I go to bed at ten o'clock, and make up the lost time
on Sundays." Neither in Leicester, Nottingham, nor Derby have wages
risen since 1833; and the worst of it is that in Leicester the truck
system prevails to a great extent, as I have mentioned. It is therefore
not to be wondered at that the weavers of this region take a very active
part in all working-men's movements, the more active and effective
because the frames are worked chiefly by men.
In this stocking weavers' district the lace industry also has its
headquarters. In the three counties mentioned there are in all 2,760
lace frames in use, while in all the rest of England there are but 786.
The manufacture of lace is greatly complicated by a rigid division of
labour, and embraces a multitude of branches. The yarn is first spooled
by girls fourteen years of age and upwards, winders; then the spools are
set up on the frames by boys, eight years old and upwards, threaders, who
pass the thread through fine openings, of which each machine has an
average of 1,800, and bring it towards its destination; then the weaver
weaves the lace which comes out of the machine like a broad piece of
cloth and is taken apart by very little children who draw out the
connecting threads. This is called running or drawing lace, and the
children themselves lace-runners. The lace is then made ready for sale.
The winders, like the threaders, have no specified working-time, being
called upon whenever the spools on a frame are empty, and are liable,
since the weavers work at night, to be required at any time in the
factory or workroom. This irregularity, the frequent night-work, the
disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude of
physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence,
upon which point all witnesses are unanimous. The work is very bad for
the eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the threaders is
not universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain, tears, and
momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading are
engendered. For the winders, however, it is certain that their work
seriously affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent
inflammations of the cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract. The
work of the weavers themselves is very difficult, as the frames have
constantly been made wider, until those now in use are almost all worked
by three men in turn, each working eight hours, and the frame being kept
in use the whole twenty-four. Hence it is that the winders and threaders
are so often called upon during the night, and must work to prevent the
frame from standing idle. The filling in of 1,800 openings with thread
occupies three children at least two hours. Many frames are moved by
steam-power, and the work of men thus superseded; and, as the Children's
Employment Commission's Report mentions only lace factories to which the
children are summoned, it seems to follow either that the work of the
weavers has been removed to great factory rooms of late, or that steam-
weaving has become pretty general; a forward movement of the factory
system in either case. Most unwholesome of all is the work of the
runners, who are usually children of seven, and even of five and four,
years old. Commissioner Grainger actually found one child of two years
old employed at this work. Following a thread which is to be withdrawn
by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad for the eyes,
especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued fourteen
to sixteen hours. In the least unfavourable case, aggravated
near-sightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough,
incurable blindness from amaurosis. But, apart from that, the children,
in consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble,
narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion. Disordered functions
of the uterus are almost universal among the girls, and curvature of the
spine also, so that "all the runners may be recognised from their gait."
The same consequences for the eyes and the whole constitution are
produced by the embroidery of lace. Medical witnesses are unanimously of
the opinion that the health of all children employed in the production of
lace suffers seriously, that they are pale, weak, delicate, undersized,
and much less able than other children to resist disease. The affections
from which they usually suffer are general debility, frequent fainting,
pains in the head, sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart,
nausea, vomiting and want of appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula,
and consumption. The health of the female lacemakers especially, is
constantly and deeply undermined; complaints are universal of anaemia,
difficult childbirth, and miscarriage. {192a} The same subordinate
official of the Children's Employment Commission reports further that the
children are very often ill-clothed and ragged, and receive insufficient
food, usually only bread and tea, often no meat for months together. As
to their moral condition, he reports: {192b}
"All the inhabitants of Nottingham, the police, the clergy, the
manufacturers, the working-people, and the parents of the children are
all unanimously of opinion that the present system of labour is a most
fruitful source of immorality. The threaders, chiefly boys, and the
winders, usually girls, are called for in the factory at the same
time; and as their parents cannot know how long they are wanted there,
they have the finest opportunity to form improper connections and
remain together after the close of the work. This has contributed, in
no small degree, to the immorality which, according to general
opinion, exists to a terrible extent in Nottingham. Apart from this,
the quiet of home life, and the comfort of the family to which these
children and young people belong, is wholly sacrificed to this most
unnatural state of things."
Another branch of lace-making, bobbin-lacework, is carried on in the
agricultural shires of Northampton, Oxford, and Bedford, chiefly by
children and young persons, who complain universally of bad food, and
rarely taste meat. The employment itself is most unwholesome. The
children work in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, sitting always bent
over the lace cushion. To support the body in this wearying position,
the girls wear stays with a wooden busk, which, at the tender age of most
of them, when the bones are still very soft, wholly displace the ribs,
and make narrow chests universal. They usually die of consumption after
suffering the severest forms of digestive disorders, brought on by
sedentary work in a bad atmosphere. They are almost wholly without
education, least of all do they receive moral training. They love
finery, and in consequence of these two influences their moral condition
is most deplorable, and prostitution almost epidemic among them. {193}
This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the
bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! Only
a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers' daughters,
a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its
equally "vile" children and children's children. But what does that come
to? Nothing, nothing whatsoever! Our English bourgeoisie will lay the
report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives and
daughters will deck themselves with lace as before. It is a beautiful
thing, the composure of an English bourgeois.
A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing
establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. In
no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such
brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers.
The application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the
discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such
cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application
of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new
arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much
more than was the case in the production of the fabrics. One man, with
the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done
formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of
printed cloth per minute. The calico printers are in a very bad way in
consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced
(according to a petition of the printers to the House of Commons), in the
year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton goods: of these, 100,000
were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in part with machinery and in
part by hand, and 10,000,000 by machinery alone, with four to six
colours. As the machinery is chiefly new and undergoes constant
improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too great for the
available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore starving; the
petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the rest are
employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week, and are
ill-paid. Leach {194} asserts of one print-work (Deeply Dale, near Bury,
in Lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more
than five shillings, though he knows that the machine-printers were
pretty well paid. The print-works are thus wholly affiliated with the
factory system, but without being subject to the legislative restrictions
placed upon it. They produce an article subject to fashion, and have
therefore no regular work. If they have small orders, they work half
time; if they make a hit with a pattern, and business is brisk, they work
twelve hours, perhaps all night. In the neighbourhood of my home, near
Manchester, there was a print-work that was often lighted when I returned
late at night; and I have heard that the children were obliged at times
to work so long there, that they would try to catch a moment's rest and
sleep on the stone steps and in the corners of the lobby. I have no
legal proof of the truth of the statement, or I should name the firm. The
Report of the Children's Employment Commission is very cursory upon this
subject, stating merely that in England, at least, the children are
mostly pretty well clothed and fed (relatively, according to the wages of
the parents), that they receive no education whatsoever, and are morally
on a low plane. It is only necessary to remember that these children are
subject to the factory system, and then, referring the reader to what has
already been said of that, we can pass on.
Of the remaining workers employed in the manufacture of clothing stuffs
little remains to be said; the bleachers' work is very unwholesome,
obliging them to breathe chlorine, a gas injurious to the lungs. The
work of the dyers is in many cases very healthful, since it requires the
exertion of the whole body; how these workers are paid is little known,
and this is ground enough for the inference that they do not receive less
than the average wages, otherwise they would make complaint. The fustian
cutters, who, in consequence of the large consumption of cotton velvet,
are comparatively numerous, being estimated at from 3,000 to 4,000, have
suffered very severely, indirectly, from the influence of the factory
system. The goods formerly woven with hand-looms, were not perfectly
uniform, and required a practised hand in cutting the single rows of
threads. Since power-looms have been used, the rows run regularly; each
thread of the weft is exactly parallel with the preceding one, and
cutting is no longer an art. The workers thrown out of employment by the
introduction of machinery turn to fustian cutting, and force down wages
by their competition; the manufacturers discovered that they could employ
women and children, and the wages sank to the rate paid them, while
hundreds of men were thrown out of employment. The manufacturers found
that they could get the work done in the factory itself more cheaply than
in the cutters' workroom, for which they indirectly paid the rent. Since
this discovery, the low upper-storey cutters' rooms stand empty in many a
cottage, or are let for dwellings, while the cutter has lost his freedom
of choice of his working-hours, and is brought under the dominion of the
factory bell. A cutter of perhaps forty-five years of age told me that
he could remember a time when he had received 8d. a yard for work, for
which he now received 1d.; true, he can cut the more regular texture more
quickly than the old, but he can by no means do twice as much in an hour
as formerly, so that his wages have sunk to less than a quarter of what
they were. Leach {196} gives a list of wages paid in 1827 and in 1843
for various goods, from which it appears that articles paid in 1827 at
the rates of 4d., 2.25d., 2.75d., and 1d. per yard, were paid in 1843 at
the rate of 1.5d., 1d., .75d., and 0.375d. per yard, cutters' wages. The
average weekly wage, according to Leach, was as follows: 1827, 1 pounds
6s. 6d.; 1 pounds 2s. 6d.; 1 pounds; 1 pounds 6s. 6d.; and for the same
goods in 1843, 10s. 6d.; 7s. 6d.; 6s. 8d.; 10s.; while there are hundreds
of workers who cannot find employment even at these last named rates. Of
the hand-weavers of the cotton industry we have already spoken; the other
woven fabrics are almost exclusively produced on hand-looms. Here most
of the workers have suffered as the weavers have done from the crowding
in of competitors displaced by machinery, and are, moreover, subject like
the factory operatives to a severe fine system for bad work. Take, for
instance, the silk weavers. Mr. Brocklehurst, one of the largest silk
manufacturers in all England, laid before a committee of members of
Parliament lists taken from his books, from which it appears that for
goods for which he paid wages in 1821 at the rate of 30s., 14s., 3.5s.,
.75s., 1.5s., 10s., he paid in 1839 but 9s., 7.25s., 2.25s., 0.333s.,
0.5s., 6.25s., while in this case no improvement in the machinery has
taken place. But what Mr. Brocklehurst does may very well be taken as a
standard for all. From the same lists it appears that the average weekly
wage of his weavers, after all deductions, was, in 1821, 16.5s., and, in
1831, but 6s. Since that time wages have fallen still further. Goods
which brought in 4d. weavers' wages in 1831, bring in but 2.5d. in 1843
(single sarsnets), and a great number of weavers in the country can get
work only when they undertake these goods at 1.5d.-2d. Moreover, they
are subject to arbitrary deductions from their wages. Every weaver who
receives materials is given a card, on which is usually to be read that
the work is to be returned at a specified hour of the day; that a weaver
who cannot work by reason of illness must make the fact known at the
office within three days, or sickness will not be regarded as an excuse;
that it will not be regarded as a sufficient excuse if the weaver claims
to have been obliged to wait for yarn; that for certain faults in the
work (if, for example, more weft-threads are found within a given space
than are prescribed), not less than half the wages will be deducted; and
that if the goods should not be ready at the time specified, one penny
will be deducted for every yard returned. The deductions in accordance
with these cards are so considerable that, for instance, a man who comes
twice a week to Leigh, in Lancashire, to gather up woven goods, brings
his employer at least 15 pound fines every time. He asserts this
himself, and he is regarded as one of the most lenient. Such things were
formerly settled by arbitration; but as the workers were usually
dismissed if they insisted upon that, the custom has been almost wholly
abandoned, and the manufacturer acts arbitrarily as prosecutor, witness,
judge, law-giver, and executive in one person. And if the workman goes
to a Justice of the Peace, the answer is: "When you accepted your card
you entered upon a contract, and you must abide by it." The case is the
same as that of the factory operatives. Besides, the employer obliges
the workman to sign a document in which he declares that he agrees to the
deductions made. And if a workman rebels, all the manufacturers in the
town know at once that he is a man who, as Leach says, {197} "resists the
lawful order as established by weavers' cards, and, moreover, has the
impudence to doubt the wisdom of those who are, as he ought to know, his
superiors in society."
Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not
force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them what
Leach translates into plain English with the words: "If you don't like to
be frizzled in my frying-pan, you can take a walk into the fire." The
silk weavers of London, and especially of Spitalfields, have lived in
periodic distress for a long time, and that they still have no cause to
be satisfied with their lot is proved by their taking a most active part
in English labour movements in general, and in London ones in particular.
The distress prevailing among them gave rise to the fever which broke out
in East London, and called forth the Commission for Investigating the
Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Class. But the last report of the
London Fever Hospital shows that this disease is still raging.
After the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of English
industry are the metal-wares. This trade has its headquarters at
Birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced, at
Sheffield for cutlery, and in Staffordshire, especially at Wolverhampton,
where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured. In
describing the position of the workers employed in these trades, let us
begin with Birmingham. The disposition of the work has retained in
Birmingham, as in most places where metals are wrought, something of the
old handicraft character; the small employers are still to be found, who
work with their apprentices in the shop at home, or when they need steam-
power, in great factory buildings which are divided into little shops,
each rented to a small employer, and supplied with a shaft moved by the
engine, and furnishing motive power for the machinery. Leon Faucher,
author of a series of articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, which at
least betray study, and are better than what has hitherto been written
upon the subject by Englishmen or Germans, characterises this relation in
contrast with the manufacture of Lancashire as "Democratie industrielle,"
and observes that it produces no very favourable results for master or
men. This observation is perfectly correct, for the many small employers
cannot well subsist on the profit divided amongst them, determined by
competition, a profit under other circumstances absorbed by a single
manufacturer. The centralising tendency of capital holds them down. For
one who grows rich ten are ruined, and a hundred placed at a greater
disadvantage than ever, by the pressure of the one upstart who can afford
to sell more cheaply than they. And in the cases where they have to
compete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident
that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty. The
apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small
employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that
they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain
independence--that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by
the bourgeoisie than under the factory system. Thus these small
employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon
the work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their
principal means of support is their own work. This peculiar midway
position of the Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so
rarely joined wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements.
Birmingham is a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town. There
are, however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in
these the factory system reigns supreme. The division of labour, which
is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry, for
example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of a great
multitude of women and children, and we find here {199} precisely the
same features reappearing which the Factories' Report presented,--the
work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers,
neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family
life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from
employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of
children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc. etc. The
children are described as half-starved and ragged, the half of them are
said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them get
nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon a
pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal--there were actually cases in
which children received no food from eight in the morning until seven at
night. Their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their
nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter. Hence they are all small
and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour. And
when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the
physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of
them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in Birmingham fit for
military service. "The working men," says a recruiting surgeon, "are
small, delicate, and of very slight physical power; many of them
deformed, too, in the chest or spinal column." According to the
assertion of a recruiting sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller
than those anywhere else, being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall; out of
613 recruits, but 238 were found fit for service. As to education, a
series of depositions and specimens taken from the metal districts have
already been given, {200a} to which the reader is referred. It appears
further, from the Children's Employment Commission's Report, that in
Birmingham more than half the children between five and fifteen years
attend no school whatsoever, that those who do are constantly changing,
so that it is impossible to give them any training of an enduring kind,
and that they are all withdrawn from school very early and set to work.
The report makes it clear what sort of teachers are employed. One
teacher, in answer to the question whether she gave moral instruction,
said, No, for threepence a week school fees that was too much to require,
but that she took a great deal of trouble to instil good principles into
the children. (And she made a decided slip in her English in saying it.)
In the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder. The
moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable. Half of
all the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single year ninety
ten-years'-old offenders, among them forty-four serious criminal cases,
were sentenced. Unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the
opinion of the commissioner, almost universal, and that at a very early
age. {200b}
In the iron district of Staffordshire the state of things is still worse.
For the coarse wares made here neither much division of labour (with
certain exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. In
Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston,
Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories,
but chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with
one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first
year. The small employers are in about the same situation as those of
Birmingham; but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. They get
almost exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have died a
natural death, or tainted meat, or fish to eat, with veal from calves
killed too young, and pork from swine smothered during transportation,
and such food is furnished not by small employers only, but by large
manufacturers, who employ from thirty to forty apprentices. The custom
seems to be universal in Wolverhampton, and its natural consequence is
frequent bowel complaints and other diseases. Moreover, the children
usually do not get enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing than
their working rags, for which reason, if for no other, they cannot go to
Sunday school. The dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much so that
they give rise to disease; and in spite of the not materially unhealthy
work, the children are puny, weak, and, in many cases, severely crippled.
In Willenhall, for instance, there are countless persons who have, from
perpetually filing at the lathe, crooked backs and one leg crooked, "hind-
leg" as they call it, so that the two legs have the form of a K; while it
is said that more than one-third of the working-men there are ruptured.
Here, as well as in Wolverhampton, numberless cases were found of
retarded puberty among girls, (for girls, too, work at the forges,) as
well as among boys, extending even to the nineteenth year. In Sedgeley
and its surrounding district, where nails form almost the sole product,
the nailers live and work in the most wretched stable-like huts, which
for filth can scarcely be equalled. Girls and boys work from the tenth
or twelfth year, and are accounted fully skilled only when they make a
thousand nails a day. For twelve hundred nails the pay is 5.75d. Every
nail receives twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs 1.25 pounds, the
nailer must lift 18,000 pounds to earn this miserable pay. With this
hard work and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop
ill-formed, undersized frames, and the commissioners depositions confirm
this. As to the state of education in this district, data have already
been furnished in the foregoing chapters. It is upon an incredibly low
plane; half the children do not even go to Sunday school, and the other
half go irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts,
can read, and in the matter of writing the case is much worse. Naturally,
for between the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to
get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the
Sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and
write their names with difficulty. The prevailing morals correspond with
these means of education. In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne asserts, and
supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no
moral sense among the workers. In general, he found that the children
neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for
them. They were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so
stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were
well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work
twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat,
and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards. They knew
nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil from
morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even
understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired.
{202}
In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers
also. On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed
here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health.
Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the
chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among
them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive
disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache,
biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia. By far
the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks,
which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early
death. The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent
posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the
quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which
fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled. The dry grinders'
average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders' rarely
exceeds forty-five. Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}
"I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only
by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the
longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent
from their work. There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.
About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between
the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age. The razor grinders,
who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years,
and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the
fortieth and fiftieth year."
The same physician gives the following description of the course of the
disease called grinders' asthma:
"They usually begin their work with the fourteenth year, and, if they
have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the
twentieth year. Then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear.
They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going
up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve
the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and
seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position
in which they work. Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their
features express anxiety, they complain of pressure upon the chest.
Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound
is as if air were driven through a wooden tube. From time to time
they expectorate considerable quantities of dust, either mixed with
phlegm or in balls or cylindrical masses, with a thin coating of
mucus. Spitting blood, inability to lie down, night sweat,
colliquative diarrhoea, unusual loss of flesh, and all the usual
symptoms of consumption of the lungs finally carry them off, after
they have lingered months, or even years, unfit to support themselves
or those dependent upon them. I must add that all attempts which have
hitherto been made to prevent grinders' asthma, or to cure it, have
wholly failed."
All this Knight wrote ten years ago; since then the number of grinders
and the violence of the disease have increased, though attempts have been
made to prevent it by covered grindstones and carrying off the dust by
artificial draught. These methods have been at least partially
successful, but the grinders do not desire their adoption, and have even
destroyed the contrivance here and there, in the belief that more workers
may be attracted to the business and wages thus reduced; they are for a
short life and a merry one. Dr. Knight has often told grinders who came
to him with the first symptoms of asthma that a return to grinding means
certain death, but with no avail. He who is once a grinder falls into
despair, as though he had sold himself to the devil. Education in
Sheffield is upon a very low plane; a clergyman, who had occupied himself
largely with the statistics of education, was of the opinion that of
16,500 children of the working-class who are in a position to attend
school, scarcely 6,500 can read. This comes of the fact that the
children are taken from school in the seventh, and, at the very latest,
in the twelfth year, and that the teachers are good for nothing; one was
a convicted thief who found no other way of supporting himself after
being released from jail than teaching school! Immorality among young
people seems to be more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else. It is
hard to tell which town ought to have the prize, and in reading the
report one believes of each one that this certainly deserves it! The
younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing
coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit
with their sweethearts until late at night, when they take walks in
solitary couples. In an ale-house which the commissioner visited, there
sat forty to fifty young people of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen
years of age, and each lad beside his lass. Here and there cards were
played, at other places dancing was going on, and everywhere drinking.
Among the company were openly avowed professional prostitutes. No
wonder, then, that, as all the witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual
intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of fourteen to
fifteen years, is extraordinarily frequent in Sheffield. Crimes of a
savage and desperate sort are of common occurrence; one year before the
commissioner's visit, a band, consisting chiefly of young persons, was
arrested when about to set fire to the town, being fully equipped with
lances and inflammable substances. We shall see later that the labour
movement in Sheffield has this same savage character. {205}
Besides these two main centres of the metal industry, there are needle
factories in Warrington, Lancashire, where great want, immorality, and
ignorance prevail among the workers, and especially among the children;
and a number of nail forges in the neighbourhood of Wigan, in Lancashire,
and in the east of Scotland. The reports from these latter districts
tell almost precisely the same story as those of Staffordshire. There is
one more branch of this industry carried on in the factory districts,
especially in Lancashire, the essential peculiarity of which is the
production of machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded out
elsewhere, are deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the very
enemy which supersedes them. Machinery for planing and boring, cutting
screws, wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out of
employment a multitude of men who formerly found regular work at good
wages; and whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of them in Manchester.
North of the iron district of Staffordshire lies an industrial region to
which we shall now turn our attention, the Potteries, whose headquarters
are in the borough of Stoke, embracing Henley, Burslem, Lane End, Lane
Delph, Etruria, Coleridge, Langport, Tunstall, and Golden Hill,
containing together 60,000 inhabitants. The Children's Employment
Commission reports upon this subject that in some branches of this
industry, in the production of stoneware, the children have light
employment in warm, airy rooms; in others, on the contrary, hard, wearing
labour is required, while they receive neither sufficient food nor good
clothing. Many children complain: "Don't get enough to eat, get mostly
potatoes with salt, never meat, never bread, don't go to school, haven't
got no clothes." "Haven't got nothin' to eat to-day for dinner, don't
never have dinner at home, get mostly potatoes and salt, sometimes
bread." "These is all the clothes I have, no Sunday suit at home." Among
the children whose work is especially injurious are the mould-runners,
who have to carry the moulded article with the form to the drying-room,
and afterwards bring back the empty form, when the article is properly
dried. Thus they must go to and fro the whole day, carrying burdens
heavy in proportion to their age, while the high temperature in which
they have to do this increases very considerably the exhaustiveness of
the work. These children, with scarcely a single exception, are lean,
pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all suffer from stomach troubles, nausea,
want of appetite, and many of them die of consumption. Almost as
delicate are the boys called "jiggers," from the "jigger" wheel which
they turn. But by far the most injurious is the work of those who dip
the finished article into a fluid containing great quantities of lead,
and often of arsenic, or have to take the freshly-dipped article up with
the hand. The hands and clothing of these workers, adults and children,
are always wet with this fluid, the skin softens and falls off under the
constant contact with rough objects, so that the fingers often bleed, and
are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this
dangerous substance. The consequence is violent pain, and serious
disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation, colic,
sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among children.
Among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colica pictorum, and
paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomena. One witness relates
that two children who worked with him died of convulsions at their work;
another who had helped with the dipping two years while a boy, relates
that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in
consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when
the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily,
accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is
paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use
of his limbs. In one factory were found in the dipping-house four men,
all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several
of whom were already epileptic. In short, this frightful disease follows
this occupation universally: and that, too, to the greater pecuniary
profit of the bourgeoisie! In the rooms in which the stoneware is
scoured, the atmosphere is filled with pulverised flint, the breathing of
which is as injurious as that of the steel dust among the Sheffield
grinders. The workers lose breath, cannot lie down, suffer from sore
throat and violent coughing, and come to have so feeble a voice that they
can scarcely be heard. They, too, all die of consumption. In the
Potteries district, the schools are said to be comparatively numerous,
and to offer the children opportunities for instruction; but as the
latter are so early set to work for twelve hours and often more per day,
they are not in a position to avail themselves of the schools, so that
three-fourths of the children examined by the commissioner could neither
read nor write, while the whole district is plunged in the deepest
ignorance. Children who have attended Sunday school for years could not
tell one letter from another, and the moral and religious education, as
well as the intellectual, is on a very low plane. {207}
In the manufacture of glass, too, work occurs which seems little
injurious to men, but cannot be endured by children. The hard labour,
the irregularity of the hours, the frequent night-work, and especially
the great heat of the working place (100 to 130 Fahrenheit), engender in
children general debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially
affections of the eye, bowel complaint, and rheumatic and bronchial
affections. Many of the children are pale, have red eyes, often blind
for weeks at a time, suffer from violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds,
and rheumatism. When the glass is withdrawn from the fire, the children
must often go into such heat that the boards on which they stand catch
fire under their feet. The glassblowers usually die young of debility
and chest affections. {208}
As a whole, this report testifies to the gradual but sure introduction of
the factory system into all branches of industry, recognisable especially
by the employment of women and children. I have not thought it necessary
to trace in every case the progress of machinery and the superseding of
men as workers. Every one who is in any degree acquainted with the
nature of manufacture can fill this out for himself, while space fails me
to describe in detail an aspect of our present system of production, the
result of which I have already sketched in dealing with the factory
system. In all directions machinery is being introduced, and the last
trace of the working-man's independence thus destroyed. In all
directions the family is being dissolved by the labour of wife and
children, or inverted by the husband's being thrown out of employment and
made dependent upon them for bread; everywhere the inevitable machinery
bestows upon the great capitalist command of trade and of the workers
with it. The centralisation of capital strides forward without
interruption, the division of society into great capitalists and
non-possessing workers is sharper every day, the industrial development
of the nation advances with giant strides towards the inevitable crisis.
I have already stated that in the handicrafts the power of capital, and
in some cases the division of labour too, has produced the same results,
crushed the small tradesmen, and put great capitalists and non-possessing
workers in their place. As to these handicraftsmen there is little to be
said, since all that relates to them has already found its place where
the proletariat in general was under discussion. There has been but
little change here in the nature of the work and its influence upon
health since the beginning of the industrial movement. But the constant
contact with the factory operatives, the pressure of the great
capitalists, which is much more felt than that of the small employer to
whom the apprentice still stood in a more or less personal relation, the
influences of life in towns, and the fall of wages, have made nearly all
the handicraftsmen active participators in labour movements. We shall
soon have more to say on this point, and turn meanwhile to one section of
workers in London who deserve our attention by reason of the
extraordinary barbarity with which they are exploited by the money-greed
of the bourgeoisie. I mean the dressmakers and sewing-women.
It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles
which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie
involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers. We have
already seen this in the case of the lacemakers, and come now to the
dressmaking establishments of London for further proof. They employ a
mass of young girls--there are said to be 15,000 of them in all--who
sleep and eat on the premises, come usually from the country, and are
therefore absolutely the slaves of their employers. During the
fashionable season, which lasts some four months, working-hours, even in
the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases,
eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on at these times without any
set regulation, so that the girls never have more than six, often not
more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more than two hours in
the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to twenty hours, if
not the whole night through, as frequently happens! The only limit set
to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the needle
another minute. Cases have occurred in which these helpless creatures
did not undress during nine consecutive days and nights, and could only
rest a moment or two here and there upon a mattress, where food was
served them ready cut up in order to require the least possible time for
swallowing. In short, these unfortunate girls are kept by means of the
moral whip of the modern slave-driver, the threat of discharge, to such
long and unbroken toil as no strong man, much less a delicate girl of
fourteen to twenty years, can endure. In addition to this, the foul air
of the workroom and sleeping places, the bent posture, the often bad and
indigestible food, all these causes, combined with almost total exclusion
from fresh air, entail the saddest consequences for the health of the
girls. Enervation, exhaustion, debility, loss of appetite, pains in the
shoulders, back, and hips, but especially headache, begin very soon; then
follow curvatures of the spine, high, deformed shoulders, leanness,
swelled, weeping, and smarting eyes, which soon become short-sighted;
coughs, narrow chests, and shortness of breath, and all manner of
disorders in the development of the female organism. In many cases the
eyes suffer, so severely that incurable blindness follows; but if the
sight remains strong enough to make continued work possible, consumption
usually soon ends the sad life of these milliners and dressmakers. Even
those who leave this work at an early age retain permanently injured
health, a broken constitution; and, when married, bring feeble and sickly
children into the world. All the medical men interrogated by the
commissioner agreed that no method of life could be invented better
calculated to destroy health and induce early death.
With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the
needle-women of London are exploited. The girls employed in stay-making
have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. And what wages do
they get? I do not know; but this I know, that the middle-man who has to
give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work
among the needle-women, receives 1.5d. per piece. From this he deducts
his own pay, at least .5d., so that 1d. at most reaches the pocket of the
girl. The girls who sew neckties must bind themselves to work sixteen
hours a day, and receive 4.5s. a week. {210} But the shirtmakers' lot is
the worst. They receive for an ordinary shirt 1.5d., formerly 2d.-3d.;
but since the workhouse of St. Pancras, which is administered by a
Radical board of guardians, began to undertake work at 1.5d., the poor
women outside have been compelled to do the same. For fine, fancy
shirts, which can be made in one day of eighteen hours, 6d. is paid. The
weekly wage of these sewing-women according to this and according to
testimony from many sides, including both needle-women and employers, is
2s. 6d. to 3s. for most strained work continued far into the night. And
what crowns this shameful barbarism is the fact that the women must give
a money deposit for a part of the materials entrusted to them, which they
naturally cannot do unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers
very well know), redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the
materials, they must appear before a Justice of the Peace, as happened a
sewing-woman in November, 1843. A poor girl who got into this strait and
did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844. These
women usually live in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where
as many crowd together as the space can possibly admit, and where, in
winter, the animal warmth of the workers is the only heat obtainable.
Here they sit bent over their work, sewing from four or five in the
morning until midnight, destroying their health in a year or two and
ending in an early grave, without being able to obtain the poorest
necessities of life meanwhile. {211} And below them roll the brilliant
equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps away some
pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than they can earn
in a year.
* * * * *
Such is the condition of the English manufacturing proletariat. In all
directions, whithersoever we may turn, we find want and disease permanent
or temporary, and demoralisation arising from the condition of the
workers; in all directions slow but sure undermining, and final
destruction of the human being physically as well as mentally. Is this a
state of things which can last? It cannot and will not last. The
workers, the great majority of the nation, will not endure it. Let us
see what they say of it.