THE AGE OF RECONSTRUCTION
The last chapter closed on the darkest scene in the long history of child
labour in this country. Of the three factors essential to a true
apprenticeship, not one was found or its need even recognized in the wild
riot of the industrial revolution. Of public or organized supervision of
the youth of the land there was not a trace. The controlling influence of
the gild system had long since disappeared; the powers of regulation that
lay in the Statute of Apprentices and the Elizabethan Poor Law had been
withdrawn; free and unrestricted traffic in the use of children was the
watchword of the age. Babies of four and five years worked alongside the
adult and for the same number of hours; there were persons of intelligence
who saw in this gain extracted from infants not the least of the triumphs
of the day. Children's lives were often a mere alternation of two kinds of
darkness--the darkness of night giving place to the darkness of the mine.
Boys and girls were hired out in troops to a taskmaster, herded in barns
regardless of the claims of health and decency, and driven in gangs into
the fields of the farmer. Whether in the mine or the factory or on the
farm, the present profits of the employer, and not the future welfare of
the race, were alone considered. Industrial training throughout the new
manufacturing districts was treated with open contempt. A person, the
masters urged, could learn the trade in a few months; while as for the
provision of an opening that would lead from the work of the youth to the
work of the adult, it was not to be imagined that a subject of this
complexity should receive attention at a time when the narrow circuit of
the prosperous factory set a limit to the horizon of men's thoughts. In
short, over the whole field of industry the desire for immediate success
dominated the larger, but more remote, interests of the future.
What was most significant of the times was not the flood of misery that
swept over the country so much as the spirit of complacent satisfaction
with which it was regarded. That the industrial revolution was in the
cause of progress, the reform of the Poor Law essential, and the decay of
the old apprenticeship system inevitable, men of intelligence could not
fail to recognize; but they might also have recognized that the profound
transformation of the whole social and industrial structure involved could
not take place without widespread suffering and demoralization. Men of the
day did see these things, but saw them with unconcern. Progress involved
change, and change demanded its toll of pain; but it was not the duty of
the State to ease the passage or to yield to the outcry of what they
looked on as the silly sentimentalist.
The general view of contemporary opinion finds itself reflected in the
Whig and Radical journals. In 1819 the _Edinburgh Review_ declared: "After
all, we must own that it was quite right to throw out the Bill for
prohibiting the sweeping of chimneys by boys--because humanity is a modern
invention; and there are many chimneys in old houses that cannot possibly
be swept in any other manner;" while the Radical paper, the _Gorgon_, was
also inclined to sneer at the House of Commons for "its ostentatious
display of humanity in dealing with trivialities like the slave trade,
climbing-boys, and the condition of children in factories." [32] The above
represents the orthodox opinion of the time. The age was the age of the
triumph of the individualist. His was the gospel that inspired the
economist; his were the maxims which guided the legislator; his were the
principles that were realized in the practice of the manufacturer. For one
brief moment in the history of the world's progress the individualist was
supreme; and then the world reeled back in horror from the hell of sin and
misery he had created. Even in the early days there were not wanting
voices to protest against the theory that in the balance-sheet of the
trader was to be found the final test of national righteousness. As far
back as the year 1801 Mr. Justice Grose, in sentencing an employer for
overworking and maltreating an apprentice, declared: "Should the
manufacturers insist that without these children they could not
advantageously follow their trade, and the overseers say that without
such opportunity they could not get rid of these children, he should say
to the one, that trade must not for the thirst of lucre be followed, but
at once, for the sake of society, be abandoned; and to the other, it is a
crime to put out these children, who have no friend to see justice done,
to incur deformity and promote consumption or other disease. This
obviously leads to their destruction--not to their support." [33] And in
the year 1802 was passed the "Health and Morals of Apprentices Act," an
Act important not for its results, which were insignificant, but as a
protest against the gospel of individualism, and as the first of the long
series of Factory Acts which heralded the dawn of a new age.
This new age, which reaches down to the present time, and of which the end
is not yet, was an age of reconstruction. It represented an attempt,
unconscious for the most part, to reinstate in a changed form the
principles which underlay the old apprenticeship system. It is true that
throughout the whole period indentured apprenticeship was in process of
gradual decay, and is now become almost a negligible factor in the
industrial world; but it is no less true that from its ruins was slowly
rising an organization destined to prove a fitting and even a superior
substitute. The final stage of development lies still in the future; the
adjustments required to meet the complex needs of modern industry are
innumerable; and we are only beginning to see the outlines of a new
apprenticeship system towards which we have been drifting for nearly a
century. To tell in detail the history of these long years of slow
progress would be foreign to the purpose of this book; but certain
characteristics, which mark the process of change, are sufficiently
germane to the discussions of to-day to justify consideration.
In the first place, the forces which repeatedly faced and beat down the
resistance of those who stood for unregulated industry were not the forces
of economic analysis; few forces that make for great changes are the
product of such unimpassioned reason. Factory and kindred legislation were
throughout the triumph of sentiment, and not the victory of logic. During
the course of the nineteenth century men became slowly more sensitive to
the fact of suffering, less tolerant of its continued existence. The
Liberal essayist was historically correct when he said contemptuously that
humanity was a modern invention. In earlier days little heed was paid to
the physical well-being of the individual journeyman or apprentice. If the
gilds forbade the carrying on of a craft by night, it was because the dim
gloom of ancient illuminants meant bad work, and not because protracted
toil made unhealthy workmen. When the State concerned itself with hours of
employment, it was to prescribe a minimum, and not to fix a maximum; to
keep a man busy, and therefore out of mischief, was deemed more important
than to allow him leisure for thought or recreation.
In this new sentiment of humanity lay the motive power which drove
Parliament on to spasmodic acts of factory legislation. The sentiment was
at once a source of weakness and a source of strength. It was a source of
weakness because sentiment is essentially local in its sphere of
influence. It does not search out the objects on which its favours are
lavished; they must be brought by others to its very doors and repeatedly
thrust over the threshold till entrance is forced. It lacks the breadth,
the insight, and the calm of that imaginative reason which is now slowly
taking its place. In the case of suffering, for example, it troubles
itself not at all about the more remote causes of suffering or the more
remote sufferer, but surges round some particular sufferer or some
particular grievance, existing here and now.[34] Sentiment, at any rate
the British type of sentiment, is not touched by abstractions; visions of
humanity in the throes of travail leave it unmoved; appeals to the
ultimate principles of justice fail to produce even a throb of sympathetic
interest; it is only the concrete--the oppressed child or the widowed
mother--that lets loose the flood. For the more profound solution of
social problems such sentiment is useless, but for the attack of specific
evils, especially where the opposition is well organized, it displays
amazing stubbornness and resource. Its strength lies in its unreason;
argument is of no avail; here are certain cases of suffering it will not
tolerate; a remedy must be found and Parliament must find it; there will
be no peace until something is done.
It was in this way that regulation of child labour began, and indeed has
continued down to the present time. The result is patchy, and the removal
of evils partial and unsystematic. There has been, for example, no serious
attempt made to set up a minimum standard of conditions under which alone
children shall be employed; least of all has the State endeavoured to
formulate a new apprenticeship system, adapted to the needs of modern
industry. Much indeed has been done in both directions; but much more
remains for the future to carry through before we can hope to read in the
efficiency of the race the sign-mark of our success. The first
characteristic, then, of the age of reconstruction is to be found in the
predominating influence of sentiment.
The second characteristic is seen in the triumph of the idealist over the
combined forces of the doctrinaire and the practical man. Every proposal
for regulating child labour was fought on the same lines; there were the
same arguments and the same replies. The individualist urged that State
interference was in itself an evil, that, though the consequences might be
delayed and the immediate effect even beneficial, you might rest assured
that in the long-run your sin would find you out. The wealthy citizen
declared that if boys might not climb his chimneys, his chimneys must go
unswept; the manufacturer predicted certain ruin to his trade if he were
forbidden to use children as seemed best to him; while all united in
urging that if the children were not at work they would be doing something
worse, and pointed out the obvious cruelty of depriving half-starved
parents of the scanty earnings of their half-starved offspring.
To all these and similar objections the idealist, with his clearer vision
of the reality of things, and firm in his faith that the prosperity of a
people could never be the final outcome of allowing an obvious wrong, made
response. He sympathized with the individualist for the dreary pessimism
of a creed which could see the future alone coloured with hope if heralded
by the sobs of suffering children. The wealthy citizen he bade roughly
burn his house and build another sooner than sacrifice the lives of boys
to the needs of his chimneys. While as for the manufacturer, he told him,
as Mr. Justice Grose had told him earlier, that, if his engines needed
children as fuel, his was a trade the country was best rid of. To those
employers who pleaded the small wages of the parents he suggested the grim
and crude and obvious remedy of paying those parents more. And the
idealist, with the sentiment of the British public to back him, won the
day.
But if sentiment gave the idealist his victory, it was the future that
brought him a full justification. His sin after many years is yet seeking
him; the wealthy citizen found other and innocent means of cleansing his
chimneys; the manufacturer placidly adapted himself to the new conditions,
and his trade flourished exceedingly; the wages of parents rose rapidly,
and what small measure of health and happiness that has come to the
children of the poor during the last century has come to them through the
defeat and the defiance of the individualist.
A hundred years have rolled by, and yet to all new regulation the same old
objections are raised by the individualist. But his day is gone, and with
his day he also is going. A few, indeed, are left, interesting survivals
of the early Victorian age. But for the great majority of the population
regulation has no fears; they welcome and invite it. And, further, not
only are they willing to forbid unsatisfactory conditions of employment,
they are also ready to spend public money to secure a proper environment
and a suitable training for children. What they will not tolerate is the
continued existence of unnecessary suffering; and they are coming more and
more to realize that a vast mass of the suffering of to-day is
unnecessary. Principles, even though openly professed, will not look
suffering in the face and pass on.[35] Humanity is no longer a modern
invention, it has become the guiding spirit of the age.
Thus we can face the morning of the twentieth century in a spirit of hope.
We may look for more consistent support and less strenuous opposition than
in the past. We may in consequence think out and introduce schemes of a
more far-reaching character. Empirical patching will give place to
reconstruction on a large scale. In other words, the sentiment of the
nineteenth century, wayward and uncertain in its method of action, and at
its best troubling itself about a remedy for actual suffering, will be
superseded by the imaginative reason of the twentieth, which looks rather
to prevention than to cure.