The Rev. Mr. Baker has recently issued a pamphlet, defending the moral
tone of the factory system against the charges brought against it in the
Rev. H. Worsley’s Prize Essay on Juvenile Depravity. We purposely
abstain from discussing the merits of the controversy, believing that
the truth lies between the two extremes advocated respectively by the
reverend disputants. Mr. Henry, however, gives a table of statistics, an
abstract of which we cannot withhold. It shows the number of spinning
and power-loom weaving concerns in the principal manufacturing districts
of Lancashire and Cheshire; also, the number of partners, so far as they
are known to the public.
It appears that in Ashton-under-Lyne, Dunkinfield, and Moseley, there
are fifty-three mills in the hands of ninety-five partners; Blackburn,
and its immediate neighbourhood, has fifty-seven mills and eighty
partners; Bolton, forty-two mills and fifty-seven partners; Barnley,
twenty-five spinning manufactories and forty-six proprietors; at Heywood
there are twenty-eight mills in the hands of forty-six masters.
Manchester, it would appear, is not so much the seat of manufacture as
of merchandise. Though it abounds in warehouses for the sale of cotton
goods, there are no more than seventy-eight cotton factories, having one
hundred and thirty-nine masters. Oldham has the greatest number of
mills; namely, one hundred and fifty-eight, with two hundred and
fifty-two proprietors; Preston, thirty-eight mills, sixty-two partners;
Stalybridge, twenty cotton concerns and forty-one proprietors;
Stockport, forty-seven mills and seventy-six masters; while Warrington
has no more than four mills, owned by ten gentlemen. The total number of
cotton manufactories in these districts is five hundred and fifty, which
belong to nine hundred and four “Cotton Lords.”
Mr. Baker’s “case” is that a proper moral supervision is exercised over
the tens of thousands of operatives employed in these factories; and
that such supervision is not delegated from principals to subordinates.
It would seem, from his showing, that of the nine hundred and four
proprietors, no more than twenty-nine do not reside where their concerns
are situated; and that of the entire aggregate of mills, there are only
four in or near to which no proprietor resides. Lancashire and Cheshire
cotton factories, therefore, are as regards absenteeism, the direct
antithesis of Irish estates. The consequence is, that while the former
are in a state of average, though intermittent prosperity, the latter
have gone to ruin.