rise of factory system—the child a charge on the state—children actually slaves under factory system—reform of 1833—oastler against the child slavery—“juvenile labour in factories is a national blessing”.
the cannibalistic stage has passed and the day of sacrifice has passed—no longer is the child frankly a convenience nor is its life, as a result of past economic stress, a lightly considered trifle to be tossed into the cauldron of religious ceremony. philosophy, humanity, civilization, and religion have combined to make the life of the child safe.
with what result?
the general belief that children were not regularly employed until the middle of the last century, when the factory system arose, had led to the equally erroneous belief that it was in the factory where the industrial abuse of children was first practised. in france where there was little industrial use for children in the large centres of population, where in other words children did not pay, the problem of modern humanity was to save infants from exposure and death. in eng313land where there was an industrial use for them from early times, and where from the earliest times there are records of their abuse, there was no necessity for measures to protect them from infanticidal tendencies. but it is in england that we must study the ill-treatment of children that was brought about by the desire to make them useful.
the industrial records of the middle ages contain but few references438 to children, for the adults were busy with their own troubles. one of the first of these notices was an order issued by the famous richard whittington, in 1398, and, although it is mixed with other considerations, it shows the human spark. it reads:
“ordinances of the hurers.
“22 richard ii., a. d. 1398. letter-book h., fol. cccxviii. (norman french).
“on the 20th day of august, in the 22d year, etc., the following articles of the trade of hurers were by richard whityngtone, mayor, and the aldermen, ordered to be entered.—
“in the first place,—that no one of the said trade shall scour a cappe or hure, or anything pertaining to scouryng, belonging to the said trade, in any open place: but they must do this in their own houses; seeing that some persons in the said 314trade have of late sent their apprentices and journeymen as well as children of tender age and others, down to the water of thames and other exposed places, and amid horrible tempests, frosts, and snows, to the very great scandal, as well of the good folks of the said trade, as of the city aforesaid. and also, because of that divers persons, and pages belonging to lords, when they take their horses down to the thames, are often-times wrangling with their said apprentices and journeymen; and they are then on the point of killing one another, to the very great peril that seems likely to ensue therefrom.”439
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the peasants were the villeins of the owners of the land and held their small farms in return for the work done, the work of children was contracted for, “the lord very frequently demanding the labour of the whole family, with the exception of the housewife.”440
nearly all the trades and manufactures in the middle ages were under the control of the guilds, so that almost all of the children working, excepting those on farms or in domestic service, came under their supervision. the attitude of the guilds toward child labour is shown in the regulations of the apprenticeships, but this interest was mainly industrial, for in regulating the work of315 the children they protected their members from cheap labour and at the same time, by their supervision over the work of the rising generation, saw that the guild’s reputation for the proper kind of labour was kept up and prices therefore held to a desirable level.441
at the same time there was a religious side to the guilds, a strong religious side, and while everything they did, such as the prohibition of night work (not out of consideration of the health of the workers but because it might lead to bad work),442 had a purely industrial aspect, there is no doubt that this social and religious side developed in the guilds and their members an outlook on the broader and more humane aspects of their own place in society. the custom of not permitting a man to employ other than his own wedded wife and his own daughter was not humanitarian in its intention but its effect could not be other than beneficial.
“no one of the said trade,” said the ordinances of the braelers (makers of braces) in 1355, “shall be so daring as to work at his trade at night ... also, that no one of the said trade shall be so daring as to set any woman to work in his trade, other than his wedded wife, or his daughter.”443
in 1562 the statute of artificers was passed, regulating the system of apprenticeship which had316 hitherto been a matter of regulation only among the guilds themselves. the national sanction thereby given to the apprentice system meant much and had a great influence in the years to come. the chief features of the act, binding by indenture, registration of the agreement, and a minimum term of seven years on the indoor system, led to the master’s entire control of the boy and up to 1814 affected the relationships of the child employed or otherwise under the control of an employer.
coincident with the development of the interest in the child as an industrial factor arose the interest in the child as a charge on the state, a phase of the child question that in the ancient civilizations had found its answer mainly in the toleration of infanticide. the common council of london on september 27, 1556, passed an act, the following extract from which will go to show that there was then an attempt to go back of the child problem and an endeavour to regulate marriage.
“forasmuche as great pouertie, penurye and lacke of lyvynge hathe of late yeres by dyverse and soundrye occasyons wayes and meanes arysen growen and encreased within this cytye of london not onelye amongste the pore artyficers and handye craftes men of the same cytie but also amongest other cytezens of suche companyes as in tymes paste have lyved and prosperouslye and in greate wealthe and one of the chiefeste occasyons thereof (as it is thought and semeth to317 all men who by longe tyme have knowne the same cytie and have had experyence of the state thereof) is by reason of the ouer hastie mariages and ouer soone setting vpp of howsholdes of and by the youthe and yonge folkes of the saide cytye whiche have commenlye vsyd and yet do to marye themselues as soone as euer they comme out of their apprentycehood be they neuer so yonge and unskyllfull....”444
in the time of henry viii. an attempt was made to take care of the question of the growing number of vagrant children by making all vagrant children between the years of five and fourteen liable to be bound out to some master as apprentices, the boys until they were twenty-four and the girls until they were twenty.445
in 1601 a statute was passed which gave to justices of the peace the power of apprenticing not only the children of paupers and vagrants but the children of those parents who were overburdened with children and who were unable to support them.
“and be it further enacted that it shalbe lawfull for the saide churchwardens and overseers, or the greater parte of them, by the assent of any two justices of the peace aforesaid, to binde any suche318 children as aforesaide to be apprentices, where they shall see convenient, till suche man child shall come to the age of fower and twentie yeares, and such woman child to the age of one and twenty yeares, or the tyme of her mariage; the same to be as effectuall to all purposes as if suche childe were of full age, and by indenture of covenant bounde hym or her selfe.”446
in the seventeenth century, the practice of putting children prematurely to work prevailed to an extent which, when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, “seems almost incredible,” says macaulay.447
a little creature of six years old was thought fit for labour in the town of norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade. writers at that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently benevolent,448 mention, “with exultation, the fact that in that single city boys and girls of tender age created wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a year.”
infant toilers in a silk mill, syria
(copyright by underwood & underwood, n. y.)
a healthy pair of indian children, western canada
the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century was sudden and violent. all the great inventions of watt, arkwright, and boulton were 319made within twenty years, steam was applied to the new looms, and the modern factory system had fairly begun.449 with the demand for labourers and the fact that the division of labour brought about a call for low-priced workmen, some of the divisions really necessitating no greater intelligence than that of a child, the children were in great demand.
it was here that the statute of artificers assisted in the crushing industrial conditions, for the overseers of the poor became the agents of the mill-owners and arranged for days when the pauper children could be inspected and selected for the factory work. when the selections had been made, the children were conveyed by canal boats and wagons to the destination, and then their slavery began. sometimes men who made a business of trafficking in children would transfer them to a factory district where they were kept in a dark cellar until the mill-owner, in want of hands, came to look them over and pick out those that he thought would be useful. nominally the children were apprentices, but actually they were slaves and their treatment was most inhuman. the parish authorities, in order to get rid of the imbeciles, often bargained that the mill-owners take one idiot with every twenty children. what became of the idiots after they had passed into the hands of the capitalist is not known, but in320 most cases they did not last long and mysteriously disappeared.
no matter what the conditions and no matter how ill the children, they were worked without any visible vestige of human feeling. even as late as 1840 in the evidence given before the select committee investigating the conditions of factories after the passage of the reform act of 1833, these were the conditions that the inspectors reported:
q. “have you many lace-mills in your district?”
a. “i have about thirty mills.”
q. “what are the usual hours of work in these mills?”
a. “the usual hours are, about nottingham, twenty hours a day, being from four o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night; about chesterfield, the report i have had from the superintendent is, that they work twenty-four hours, all through the night, in several mills there.”
q. “are there many children and young persons in those mills?”
a. “the proportion is less in lace-mills than in others, but it is necessary to have some of them; the process of winding and preparing the bobbins and carriages requires children; those that i saw so employed were from ten to fifteen years of age.”
q. “are the children detained in the mills during a considerable period of the day and night?”
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a. “i can speak from information derived from two or three mill-owners, and also more extensively from reports by one of the superintendents in my district; and i should say that in most of the mills they do detain them at night; in some of them, the report states that they are detained all night, in order to be ready when wanted.”
q. “are the children that are so detained liable to be detained throughout the day, and do they sometimes begin their work at twelve o’clock at night?”
a. “in the mills at nottingham there are owners that make it a rule that they will not keep the children after eight, or nine, or ten o’clock, according to the inclination of the mill-occupier.”
q. “where are those children during the time they are detained in the mill?”
a. “when detained at night, and not employed i am told they are lying about on the floor.”
q. “is it customary to close at eight on saturday evening in the lace-mills?”
a. “i think it is.”
q. “how then do they compensate for the loss of those four hours work in those mills?”
a. “by working all night on friday; those are the mills in which they pay so much for their power.”
q. “must not there be a considerable wear and tear upon the physical constitution of children who are kept in this state?”
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a. “i think it is self-evident.”
q. “is there any possibility of their obtaining education under those circumstances?”
a. “none whatever, except on sundays.”
q. “but, after one hundred and twenty hours’ work in the week, is it possible that they can have much capacity for study on sunday?”
a. “it is not always that the same children are kept twenty hours, because some mills have two complete sets of hands for their machinery, and they work the same set of hands only ten hours.”
q. “but, even under those circumstances, it must frequently happen that the same children are employed during the night twice or thrice in the course of a week?”
a. “the practice generally is that they take the night-work for one week, and then the next week the morning-work.”
q. “so that during one whole week they are employed in the night-work?”
a. “yes.”
q. “at the end of a week, during which they have been employed in the night, do you think that they have much capacity left for study on sunday?”
a. “no; my opinion is most decidedly that either turning out at four o’clock in the morning, or being kept out of bed at night, must be injurious to children, both to their physical constitution and their mental powers.”
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q. “the law, as it stands, does not prevent the children from being employed even twenty hours?”
a. “it does not apply to lace-mills.”
q. “therefore the period during which the child is employed depends upon the varying humanity of the individual proprietor of the mill?”
a. “yes.”
q. “you say that it sometimes happens that the children come to the mill at five in the morning, and do not leave it till ten at night?”
a. “it is reported to me that it does so happen about chesterfield.”
q. “if a child is kept in winter till twelve o’clock at night, and has then to go home and return to the factory in the morning, a distance of two miles, does not he undergo fearful hardships?”
a. “certainly.”450
the children who were apprenticed out to the mill-owners were fed on the coarsest kind of food and in the most disgusting way. they slept by turns, in relays, in beds that were never aired, for one set of children were turned into the beds as soon as another set had been driven out to their long and filthy toil. some tried to run away and after that they were worked with chains around their ankles; many died and the little graves were unmarked in a desolate spot lest the number of the dead attract too much attention.
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sixteen hours a day, six days a week, was no uncommon time for children, and on sunday they worked to clean the machine.
“in stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”451
the agitation against these conditions led, in 1802, to an act being passed by the influence of sir robert peel for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills.
the immediate cause of this was the fearful spread through the factories in the manchester district of epidemic diseases due to overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, among the working people and especially among the children.
as far as reforming the conditions in which the children lived, the act, however, was a dead letter, and in a debate introduced by sir robert peel on june 6, 1815, one speaker, horner, told of the sale of a gang of children with the effects of a bankrupt.
“a still more atrocious instance,” continued the speaker, “had been brought before the court325 of king’s bench two years ago, when a number of these boys apprenticed by a parish in london to one manufacturer had been transferred (i. e., sold) to another and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine.”452
no longer could people ignore conditions such as these and a select committee of the house of commons was empowered to take evidence on the state of children working in the manufactories of great britain. despite the horrible nature of the evidence, when the act resulting from the investigation was passed, all that it did was to make nine years the limit to age employment and twelve hours a day the working day for those under sixteen years. but it was limited in effect to cotton factories only, leaving the woollen and worsted factories absolutely untouched, and even in the matter of the cotton factories these provisions were frequently avoided.
conditions continued to become worse instead of better, children of both sexes being beaten and overworked to make profit for the rich capitalists until 1830, when richard oastler, who had led in the fight against black slavery, had his attention called to the conditions under which the children of england were practically enslaved.453
oastler was talking one night about his slavery reforms to a friend near bradford and the remark was made to him: “i wonder you never turned326 your attention to the factory.” “why should i?” replied the young abolitionist, “i have nothing to do with factories.” “perhaps not,” was the answer, “but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in the west indies and i assure you that there are cruelties practised in our mills on little children which i am sure if you knew you would try to prevent.”
the man who gave this suggestion, john wood, was himself an owner of a mill and he admitted to oastler that in his own mill the little children were worked from six in the morning until seven at night with a break of only forty minutes for lunch and that various devices, including beatings with sticks and straps and clubs, were employed to goad them on to renewed labour.
the very next day oastler began a crusade which lasted for many weary years. he succeeded in interesting j. hobhouse and m. t. sadler, both members of the house of commons, and the ten hours agitation began in and out of parliament. in the course of a speech delivered in march, 1832, in favour of the ten hours bill, sadler declared that so great was the demand in some districts for children’s labour that “an indispensable condition of marriage among the working classes was the certainty of offspring whose wages, beginning at six years old, might keep their inhuman fathers and mothers in idleness.”
“our ancestors could not have supposed it possible,” exclaimed sadler, “posterity will not327 believe it true—that a generation of englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would work lisping infancy a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded.”
but, to the nation’s eternal disgrace, that generation of englishmen did exist, and mr. sadler told the house, detail by detail, of the evils and outrages of the whole abominable system. excessive hours, low wages, immorality, ill-health—all were enumerated, and then he continued:
“then in order to keep them awake, to stimulate their exertions, means are made use of to which i shall now advert, as a last instance of the degradation to which this system has reduced the manufacturing operatives of this country. children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, and i hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten, beaten in your free market of labour as you term it, like slaves. the poor wretch is flogged before its companions, flogged, i say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. we speak with execration of the cartwhip of the west indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong in england.”454
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interesting too was the fact brought out at this time that while these were the conditions in england, in the colonies black labour was protected to the extent that nine hours a day was the legal day for adults and young persons and children were not allowed to work more than six, while night work was simply prohibited.
the investigation of the sadler committee evoked the interesting information from one witness that children were never employed if they were under five.
the attitude of the employers toward the agitation can be best judged from the following extracts:
“every man acquainted with the political history of the last century must know, that the labour of children was actually pointed out to the manufacturers by mr. william pitt, as a new resource by which they might be enabled to bear the additional load of taxation which the necessities of the state compelled him to impose. the necessity for labour created by this taxation has not yet abated; because the immense capital taken away by the enormous expenditure of the great wars arising out of the french revolution, an expenditure which was mainly supported out of the industrial resources of the country, has not been replaced. but even independent of these considerations, and irrespective of a past which can never be recalled, we mean to assert, as we have done elsewhere, in broad terms and the plainest language, that the infant labour, as it is erroneously329 called—or the juvenile labour, as it should be called—in factories, is in fact a national blessing, and absolutely necessary for the support of the manifold fiscal burthens which have been placed upon the industry of this country. it is quite sufficient to say that the children of the operatives have mouths, and must be fed; they have limbs, and must be clothed; they have minds, which ought to be instructed; and they have passions, which must be controlled. now, if the parents are unable to provide these requisites, and their inability to do so is just as notorious as their existence, it becomes absolutely necessary that the children should aid in obtaining them for themselves. to abolish juvenile labour, is plainly nothing else than to abolish juvenile means of support; and to confine it within very narrow limits, is just to subtract a dinner or a supper from the unhappy objects of mistaken benevolence.”455
the result of all this agitation and debate was the famous act of 1833 introduced by lord shaftesbury which prohibited night work to persons under eighteen in cotton, woollen, and other factories, and provided that children from nine to thirteen years of age were not to work more than forty-eight hours a week and those from thirteen to eighteen not to work more than sixty-eight hours. children under nine were not to be employed at all.
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even this much was not obtained until oastler had succeeded in driving home to the british mind conditions such as are described in a speech delivered at huddersfield, december 26, 1831, of which the following is an extract:
“i will not picture fiction to you,” said oastler, in the early days of the factory movement, “but i will tell you what i have seen. take a little female captive, six or seven years old; she shall rise from her bed at four in the morning of a cold winter day, but before she rises she wakes perhaps half a dozen times, and says, ‘father, is it time? father, is it time?’ and at last, when she gets up and puts her little bits of rags upon her weary limbs—weary yet with the last day’s work—she leaves her parents in their bed, for their labour (if they have any) is not required so early. she trudges alone through rain and snow, and mire and darkness, to the mill, and there for thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen hours is she obliged to work with only thirty minutes’ interval for meals and play. homeward again at night she would go, when she was able, but many a time she hid herself in the wool in the mill, as she had not strength to go. and if she were one moment behind the appointed time; if the bell had ceased to ring when she arrived with trembling, shivering, weary limbs at the factory door, there stood a monster in human form, and as she passed he lashed her. this,” he continued, holding up an overlooker’s strap, “is no fiction. it was hard at331 work in this town last week. the girl i am speaking of died; but she dragged on that dreadful existence for several years.”456
while oastler was delivering this speech and these conditions were rife, malthus was revising the first edition of his essay on population.
