_Manchester.—Cotton Manufactory.—Remarks upon the pernicious Effects of
the manufacturing System._
J. had provided us with letters to a gentleman in Manchester; we
delivered them after breakfast, and were received with that courtesy
which a foreigner, when he takes with him the expected recommendations,
is sure to experience in England. He took us to one of the great cotton
manufactories, showed us the number of children who were at work there,
and dwelt with delight on the infinite good which resulted from
employing them at so early an age. I listened without contradicting him,
for who would lift up his voice against Diana in Ephesus!—proposed my
questions in such a way as not to imply, or at least not to advance, any
difference of opinion, and returned with a feeling at heart which makes
me thank God I am not an Englishman.
There is a shrub in some of the East Indian islands which the French
call _veloutier_; it exhales an odour that is agreeable at a distance,
becomes less so as you draw nearer, and, when you are quite close to it,
is insupportably loathsome. Alciatus himself could not have imagined an
emblem more appropriate to the commercial prosperity of England.
Mr —— remarked, that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as
manufactures. "You see these children, sir," said he. "In most parts of
England poor children are a burthen to their parents and to the parish;
here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all
expense; they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and
by the time they are seven or eight years old bring in money. There is
no idleness among us:—they come at five in the morning; we allow them
half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at
six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand
still." I was looking while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with
which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the
machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion: and
when he told me there was no rest in these walls, day nor night, I
thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here
was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.
"These children, then," said I, "have no time to receive instruction."
"That, sir," he replied, "is the evil which we have found. Girls are
employed here from the age you see them till they marry, and then they
know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or
boil a potatoe. But we are remedying this now, and send the children to
school for an hour after they have done work." I asked if so much
confinement did not injure their health. "No," he replied, "they are as
healthy as any children in the world can be. To be sure, many of them as
they grew up went off in consumptions, but consumption was the disease
of the English." I ventured to enquire afterwards concerning the morals
of the people who were trained up in this monstrous manner, and found,
what was to be expected, that in consequence of herding together such
numbers of both sexes, who are utterly uninstructed in the commonest
principles of religion and morality, they were as debauched and
profligate as human beings under the influence of such circumstances
must inevitably be; the men drunken, the women dissolute; that however
high the wages they earned, they were too improvident ever to lay-by for
a time of need; and that, though the parish was not at the expense of
maintaining them when children, it had to provide for them in diseases
induced by their mode of life, and in premature debility and old age;
the poor-rates were oppressively high, and the hospitals and workhouses
always full and overflowing. I enquired how many persons were employed
in the manufactory, and was told, children and all about two hundred.
What was the firm of the house?—There were two partners. So! thought
I,—a hundred to one!
"We are well off for hands in Manchester," said Mr ——; "manufactures are
favourable to population, the poor are not afraid of having a family
here, the parishes therefore have always plenty to apprentice, and we
take them as fast as they can supply us. In new manufacturing towns they
find it difficult to get a supply. Their only method is to send people
round the country to get children from their parents. Women usually
undertake this business; they promise the parents to provide for the
children; one party is glad to be eased of a burthen, and it answers
well to the other to find the young ones in food, lodging, and clothes,
and receive their wages." "But if these children should be ill-used?"
said I. "Sir," he replied, "it never can be the interest of the women to
use them ill, nor of the manufacturers to permit it."
It would have been in vain to argue had I been disposed to it. Mr —— was
a man of humane and kindly nature, who would not himself use any thing
cruelly, and judged of others by his own feelings. I thought of the
cities in Arabian romance, where all the inhabitants were enchanted:
here Commerce is the queen witch, and I had no talisman strong enough to
disenchant those who were daily drinking of the golden cup of her
charms.
We purchase English cloth, English muslins, English buttons, &c. and
admire the excellent skill with which they are fabricated, and wonder
that from such a distance they can be afforded to us at so low a price,
and think what a happy country is England! A happy country indeed it is
for the higher orders; no where have the rich so many enjoyments, no
where have the ambitious so fair a field, no where have the ingenious
such encouragement, no where have the intellectual such advantages; but
to talk of English happiness is like talking of Spartan freedom, the
Helots are overlooked. In no other country can such riches be acquired
by commerce, but it is the one who grows rich by the labour of the
hundred. The hundred human beings like himself, as wonderfully fashioned
by Nature, gifted with the like capacities, and equally made for
immortality, are sacrificed body and soul. Horrible as it must needs
appear, the assertion is true to the very letter. They are deprived in
childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment; of the sports in which
childhood instinctively indulges, of fresh air by day and of natural
sleep by night. Their health physical and moral is alike destroyed; they
die of diseases induced by unremitting task-work, by confinement in the
impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or
vegetable dust which they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow
up without decency, without comfort, and without hope, without morals,
without religion, and without shame, and bring forth slaves like
themselves to tread in the same path of misery.
The dwellings of the labouring manufacturers are in narrow streets and
lanes, blocked up from light and air, not, as in our country, to exclude
an insupportable sun, but crowded together because every inch of land is
of such value, that room for light and air cannot be afforded them. Here
in Manchester a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and
dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate, because no
exertions of domestic care can ever make such homes decent. These places
are so many hot-beds of infection; and the poor in large towns are
rarely or never without an infectious fever among them, a plague of
their own, which leaves the habitations of the rich, like a Goshen of
cleanliness and comfort, unvisited.
Wealth flows into the country, but how does it circulate there? Not
equally and healthfully through the whole system; it sprouts into wens
and tumours, and collects in aneurisms which starve and palsy the
extremities. The government indeed raises millions now as easily as it
raised thousands in the days of Elizabeth: the metropolis is six times
the size which it was a century ago; it has nearly doubled during the
present reign; a thousand carriages drive about the streets of London,
where, three generations ago, there were not an hundred; a thousand
hackney coaches are licensed in the same city, where at the same
distance of time there was not one; they whose grandfathers dined at
noon from wooden trenchers, and upon the produce of their own farms, sit
down by the light of waxen tapers to be served upon silver, and to
partake of delicacies from the four quarters of the globe. But the
number of the poor, and the sufferings of the poor, have continued to
increase; the price of every thing which they consume has always been
advancing, and the price of labour, the only commodity which they have
to dispose of, remains the same. Work-houses are erected in one place,
and infirmaries in another; the poor-rates increase in proportion to the
taxes; and in times of dearth the rich even purchase food, and retail it
to them at a reduced price, or supply them with it gratuitously: still
every year adds to their number. Necessity is the mother of crimes; new
prisons are built, new punishments enacted; but the poor become year
after year more numerous, more miserable, and more depraved; and this is
the inevitable tendency of the manufacturing system.
This system is the boast of England,—long may she continue to boast it
before Spain shall rival her! Yet this is the system which we envy, and
which we are so desirous to imitate. Happily our religion presents one
obstacle; that incessant labour which is required in these task-houses
can never be exacted in a Catholic country, where the Church has wisely
provided so many days of leisure for the purposes of religion and
enjoyment. Against the frequency of these holy days much has been said;
but Heaven forbid that the clamour of philosophizing commercialists
should prevail, and that the Spaniard should ever be brutalized by
unremitting task-work, like the negroes in America, and the labouring
manufacturers in England! Let us leave to England the boast of supplying
all Europe with her wares; let us leave to these lords of the sea the
distinction of which they are so tenacious, that of being the white
slaves of the rest of the world, and doing for it all its dirty work.
The poor must be kept miserably poor, or such a state of things could
not continue; there must be laws to regulate their wages, not by the
value of their work, but by the pleasures of their masters; laws to
prevent their removal from one place to another within the kingdom, and
to prohibit their emigration out of it. They would not be crowded in hot
task-houses by day, and herded together in damp cellars at night; they
would not toil in unwholesome employments from sun-rise till sun-set,
whole days, and whole days and quarters, for with twelve hours labour
the avidity of trade is not satisfied; they would not sweat night and
day, keeping up this _laus perennis_[7] of the Devil, before furnaces
which are never suffered to cool, and breathing in vapours which
inevitably produce disease and death; the poor would never do these
things unless they were miserably poor, unless they were in that state
of abject poverty which precludes instruction, and, by destroying all
hope for the future, reduces man, like the brutes, to seek for nothing
beyond the gratification of present wants.
How England can remedy this evil, for there are not wanting in England
those who perceive and confess it to be an evil, it is not easy to
discover, nor is it my business to enquire. To us it is of more
consequence to know how other countries may avoid it, and, as it is the
prevailing system to encourage manufactures every where, to enquire how
we may reap as much good and as little evil as possible. The best
methods appear to be by extending to the utmost the use of machinery,
and leaving the price of labour to find its own level: the higher it is
the better. The introduction of machinery in an old manufacturing
country always produces distress by throwing workmen out of employ, and
is seldom effected without riots and executions. Where new fabrics are
to be erected it is obvious that this difficulty does not exist, and
equally obvious that, when hard labour can be performed by iron and
wood, it is desirable to spare flesh and blood. High wages are a general
benefit, because money thus distributed is employed to the greatest
general advantage. The labourer, lifted up one step in society, acquires
the pride and the wants, the habits and the feelings, of the class now
next above him.[8] Forethought, which the miserably poor necessarily and
instinctively shun, is, to him who earns a comfortable competence, new
pleasure; he educates his children, in the hope that they may rise
higher than himself, and that he is fitting them for better fortunes.
Prosperity is said to be more dangerous than adversity to human virtue;
both are wholesome when sparingly distributed, both in the excess
perilous always, and often deadly: but if prosperity be thus dangerous,
it is a danger which falls to the lot of few; and it is sufficiently
proved by the vices of those unhappy wretches who exist in slavery,
under whatever form or in whatever disguise, that hope is as essential
to prudence, and to virtue, as to happiness.
[7] I am informed by a catholic, that those convents in which the choir
service is never discontinued are said to have _laus perennis_ there.—TR.
[8] This argument has been placed in a more forcible light in the first
volume of the Annual Review, in an article upon the Reports of the
Society for bettering the Condition of the Poor, attributed to a
gentleman of Norwich. It is one of the ablest chapters upon this branch
of political œconomy that has ever been written.—TR.