WORK ON THE FACTORY COMMISSION, 1833.
In the year 1833 it became clear that some legal interference was
necessary with regard to Factories.
In order to understand the abuses which existed in factories in 1833, we
must revert to the system of employment at the end of the last century
and trace its gradual development.
At that period all the spinning and weaving of the country was domestic,
the spinning being carried on in farmhouses and scattered cottages in
rural places by the mothers and daughters of the families, and the
weaving by men working in their own homes in towns and villages. This
peaceful state of things did not last beyond the beginning of the
present century. The "spinning-jenny" and "power-loom" were invented,
and changes occurred. Large buildings were now needed to carry on the
work, and mills and factories sprang up beside the streams of
Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Lancashire, these places being chosen
because water was required to turn the new machinery. The water-wheel
now did much of the work which had formerly needed the strong arms of
men, but the small and nimble fingers of children were henceforth called
into play, as they were found to be specially fitted for much of that
which remained to be done by hand. Thus it came about that children's
labour, in consequence of its greater cheapness, was substituted for
that of grown people.
In order to get a sufficient supply of children, which the scanty
population near the mills could not afford, manufacturers applied to the
managers of the workhouses in London and other large towns, for pauper
children to be taken as apprentices. Hundreds, it is said even
thousands, of children were thus taken away from even the slight
protection which the tender mercies of the workhouse authorities of that
day might afford, and placed entirely in the power of the master
manufacturer, or, worse still, of his overseer.
The evils that resulted from this apprenticeship system resembled those
springing from slavery. One writer[13] says:--
"There is abundant evidence on record, and preserved in the recollection
of some who still live, to show that, in many of the manufacturing
districts, cruelties the most heartrending were practised upon the
unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the care
of the master manufacturers; that they were harassed to the brink of
death by excess of labour, that they were flogged, fettered, and
tortured to the most exquisite refinements of cruelty; that they were in
many cases starved to the bone whilst flogged to their work; and that,
in some instances, they were driven to commit suicide to evade the
cruelties of a world where, though born into it so recently, their
happiest moments had been passed in the garb and in the coercion of a
workhouse. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Lancashire,
and Nottinghamshire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal
solitudes of torture and of many a murder."
The Legislature interfered, and in 1802 passed an Act for regulating
factories and protecting the apprentices employed in them. This Act was
brought in and carried by Sir Robert Peel, the father of the statesman
who repealed the Corn Laws, and himself a large manufacturer.
A further change in the history of manufacture, however, occurred. The
steam-engine was invented, and when its power was applied to
manufacture, it was no longer necessary to build factories where
water-power was at hand; they were henceforth principally established in
towns. Apprentices were now but little employed; free, paid
child-labour, here to be obtained in abundance, was preferred by the
mill-owners. They had never wished for apprentices; the charge of them
had always entailed considerable trouble; the responsibility was felt
heavily by conscientious masters, whilst the legal restrictions of Sir
Robert Peel's Act prevented the avaricious and hard-hearted from
profiting by the abuses of the system. Apprenticeship therefore died a
natural death.
It might be thought that children employed under the new plan, receiving
wages and living at home under the protection of their parents, would
suffer no hardships calling for legal restraint; but representations
having been made to the Government that abuses had crept in, a Royal
Commission of inquiry was determined upon in 1833.
On this occasion Dr Southwood Smith was appointed by the Government a
member of this Commission, conjointly with Mr Tooke and Mr Edwin
Chadwick.[14]
Their first work was to send district commissioners into the
manufacturing regions to collect evidence, and the results of those
inquiries were embodied in the general Report. My grandfather took a
deep interest in the subject, for the evils disclosed by the inspection,
if not so great as they had been under the apprenticeship system, were
still sufficiently appalling: children, some of them not more than five
years old, were obliged to work the same number of hours as the adult
operatives--twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours a-day--sometimes the
whole night; their health was thus often ruined for life; neither time
nor strength remained for education; they were growing up totally
ignorant; and they were, besides, often unkindly treated.
It is sad to see in the Report such words as these, quoted from the
children's lips: "I am sick tired, especially in the winter nights." "So
tired when I leave the mill that I can do nothing." "I feel so tired
when I gang home that I throw myself down, no caring what I does." "So
tired I am not able to set one foot by the other." "Many a time I have
been so fatigued I could hardly take off my clothes at night, or put
them on in the morning. My mother would be raging at me, because when I
sat down I could not get up again through the house."
As to their ruined health, such sentences as these foretell it: "Many
nights I do not get a wink of sleep from the pain." "My knees failed
from the work." Or, "Severe pains would come on, particularly in the
morning."
The evidence of the overseers and managers is scarcely less strong than
that of the little sufferers themselves.
One manager says: "I have known the children hide themselves in the wool
so that they could not go home when the work was over. I have seen six
or eight fetched out of the stove and beat out of the mill."
Another says: "After the children from eight to twelve years old had
worked eight or nine hours, they were nearly ready to faint: only kept
to their work by being spoken to, or by a little chastisement to make
them jump up. I was sometimes obliged to chastise them when they were
almost fainting, and it hurt my feelings; then they would spring up and
work pretty well for another hour; but the last two or three hours were
my hardest work, for they then got so exhausted."
And a third manager says: "I have seen them fall asleep, and they were
performing their work with their hands, while they were asleep, after
the 'billy' had stopped and their work was over."
Two great objections were made to any legislative limitation of the
number of hours of children's labour. One was, that it was impossible to
shorten their hours of work without also shortening those of the adults,
who could not go on without them; the other, that it was wrong to
restrict the liberty of the subject.
The first of these was, truly, a difficulty; but if the evil was so very
great, it appeared to my grandfather and those acting with him that some
change _must_ be made in the mode of working, rather than overtax the
children to this extent. Relays of children must be obtained, or
grown-up workers must be substituted as assistants.
With regard to the second objection--that it would be restricting the
liberty of private individuals if the law interfered--the Report shows
that children, at the age at which they suffered these injuries, were
not free agents, but were let out to hire by their parents, by whom
their wages were appropriated, and who were easily rendered callous to
their children's wrongs by a threat of dismissal, or a bribe of an
additional penny an hour of wage. If the law did not step in to protect
these unfortunate little ones from parents whose selfishness and
ignorance was allowing them to grow up diseased and benighted, where,
argues the Report, was their help to come from?
The question as to whether it is right in any instance for the
Government to intervene between parent and child, is now practically
settled by the many laws and enactments which regulate children's
education and hours of labour. But in those days the idea of any
restriction of a parent's right over his child excited much opposition.
It was regarded by many people as both impracticable and undesirable.
The reformers, however, carried their point and achieved success. That
very year the Factory Act passed, and the recommendations of the Report
were nearly all embodied in it. No child was allowed to be employed at
all under eight years old; children between eight and thirteen were only
allowed to work six and a half hours a-day; and all those employed were
obliged to attend school for three hours a-day. Inspectors were
appointed to see that the provisions of the Act were fully carried out.
Of course there was considerable indignation on the part of the
millowners, but many of those who at first objected to the restrictions
were afterwards convinced of their utility, and as time passed on this
conviction spread amongst all classes and gathered strength.
The only modifications of the Act of 1833 which have been made since,
have been mere extensions of its principles. The regulations, which at
first applied to cotton, cloth, and silk mills only, have been extended
by subsequent Acts to bleaching and dyeing works. Powers have also been
given to compel the fencing of machinery, and to enforce other
safeguards against injury to the workpeople.
Even after the Factory Commission had finished its work, and had ceased
to exist, my grandfather continued to watch with interest the results of
what had been done. Five years afterwards, the House of Commons having
ordered a Return showing the working of the educational provisions of
the Act, he went down himself to various mills, and I find his copy of
the Return thickly pencilled with marginal notes like the following:--
"I visited this mill myself with a view to examine the school." "The
whole neighbourhood was opposed to the direction of the mill. They now
consider it a great blessing." "The children of the higher class of
people are anxious to get employment in the mills."
It must have given him great delight to feel that, as was said by a
writer eleven years later--
"The present Act has led to an amelioration of the treatment, and an
improvement in the physical and moral character, of the vast juvenile
population, such as was never before effected by an Act of Parliament;
while the benefits resulting from it to all parties, the employers no
less than the employed, are not only rapidly multiplying and extending,
but are becoming more and more the subjects of general acknowledgment
and gratulation. There is reason to believe that the total number
employed in factory labour in the United Kingdom is little short of
1,000,000.[15] In one district, not by any means one of the largest, the
number of children attending school was increased from 200 to 2316."
Footnote 13:
M. Fielden, M.P., 'The Curse of the Factory System.'
Footnote 14:
This Commission, for considering the employment of children in
_factories_, preceded by eleven years the one relating to their
employment in _mines_ alluded to in the Introduction.
Footnote 15:
This was in 1844.