[P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England.
London, 1833, pp.161-162, 202-203.]
Any man who has stood at twelve o'clock at the single narrow door-way, which
serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills,
must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls,
taking them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller
compass. Their complexion is sallow and pallid--with a peculiar flatness of
feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance to
cushion out the cheeks. Their stature low--the average height of four hundred
men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six
inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general
bowing of the legs. Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or
awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures. Nearly all have flat feet,
accompanied with a down-tread, differing very widely from the elasticity of
action in the foot and ankle, attendant upon perfect formation. Hair thin and
straight--many of the men having but little beard, and that in patches of a few
hairs, much resembling its growth among the red men of America. A spiritless
and dejected air, a sprawling and wide action of the legs, and an appearance,
taken as a whole, giving the world but "little assurance of a man,"
or if so, "most sadly cheated of his fair proportions..."
Factory labour is a species of work, in some respects singularly unfitted
for children. Cooped up in a heated atmosphere, debarred the necessary
exercise, remaining in one position for a series of hours, one set or system of
muscles alone called into activity, it cannot be wondered at--that its effects
are injurious to the physical growth of a child. Where the bony system is still
imperfect, the vertical position it is compelled to retain, influences its
direction; the spinal column bends beneath the weight of the head, bulges out
laterally, or is dragged forward by the weight of the parts composing the
chest, the pelvis yields beneath the opposing pressure downwards, and the
resistance given by the thigh-bones; its capacity is lessened, sometimes more
and sometimes less; the legs curve, and the whole body loses height, in
consequence of this general yielding and bending of its parts.
John Fielden, although himself a Lancashire factory
owner, was one of the staunchest fighters for protective legislation for the cotton
worker. His difficulties are such as today in the Southern states of the United
States are commonly urged by manufacturers.
[John Fielden, M.P., The Curse of the Factory System.
London, 1836,pp. 34-35.]
Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory-system; as improvements
in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many
to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to
perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labour to be less for all
ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but
to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade
altogether. This has been the case with regard to myself and my partners. We
have never worked more than seventy-one hours a week before Sir JOHN
HOBHOUSE'S Act was passed. We then came down to sixty-nine; and since
Lord ALTHORP's Act was passed, in 1833, we have reduced the time of adults to sixty-seven
and a half hours a week, and that of children under thirteen years of age
to forty-eight hours in the week, though to do this latter has, I must
admit, subjected us to much inconvenience, but the elder hands to more,
inasmuch as the relief given to the child is in some measure imposed on the
adult. But the overworking does not apply to children only; the adults are also
overworked. The increased speed given to machinery within the last thirty
years, has, in very many instances, doubled the labour of both.
Sending boys up chimneys to clean them was a common
practice, and a dangerous and cruel one. Lord Ashley became the chief advocate
of the use of chimney-sweeping machinery and of legislation to require its use.
Even earlier, however, such a law had been proposed, but it met with strong
opposition. In a debate on this subject in the House of Lords in 1819 the Earl
of Lauderdale well represented a large body of conservative opinion.
[Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, March 8, 1819. New
Series, vol. 39, p. 901.]
Their lordships had lately heard complaints of the encouragement given to
machinery, in preference to manual industry. Now, though he differed most completely
from those who cherished the prejudice he alluded to--though he was convinced
that the introduction of machinery had not only had the effect of enriching the
proprietor, but also of enabling the workman to live better and cheaper than he
otherwise could have done--yet there certainly was some difference to be drawn
between their encouraging and enforcing the adoption of machinery, and
especially when those persons who best understood its application in the way of
trade were against its introduction at all. ...If their lordships were
determined to adopt such a course, they must introduce a code of moral
legislation unknown to their ancestors, and quite unsuited to their habits and
laws. The better way, in his judgment, would be to leave reforms of this kind
entirely to the moral feeling of, perhaps, the most moral people, on the whole
face of the earth.
When Sadler was defeated for reelection in 1833 by Macaulay,
his successor as leader in the campaign for shorter hours was Lord Ashley,
later Earl of
Shaftesbury, whose achievements in this field exceeded any other man's.
More than a generation later the old Earl of Shaftesbury, speaking for a bill
to relieve conditions of textile workers in India, commented on the great gains
brought about by similar legislation in England.
[Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Apr. 4, 1879. 3rd
Series, vol. CCXLV, pp. 355-356.]
The other is the old, the often-repeated, and as often-refuted, argument
that the work is light. Light! Why, no doubt, much of it is light, if measured
by the endurance of some three or four minutes. But what say you, my Lords, to
a continuity of toil, in a standing posture, in a poisonous atmosphere, during
13 hours, with 15 minutes of rest? Why, the stoutest man in England, were he
made, in such a condition of things, to do nothing during the whole of that
time but be erect on his feet and stick pins in a pincushion, would sink under
the burden. What say you, then, of children--children of the tenderest years?
Why, they become stunted, crippled, deformed, useless. I speak what I know--I
state what I have seen. When I visited Bradford, in Yorkshire, in 1838, being
desirous to see the condition of the children--for I knew that they were
employed at very early ages in the worsted business....I asked for a collection
of cripples and deformities. In a short time more than 80 were gathered in a
large courtyard. They were mere samples of the entire mass. I assert without
exaggeration that no power of language could describe the varieties, and I may
say, the cruelties, in all these degradations of the human form. They stood or
squatted before me in all the shapes of the letters of the alphabet. This was
the effect of prolonged toil on the tender frames of children at early ages.
When I visited Bradford, under the limitation of hours some years afterwards, I
called for a similar exhibition of cripples; but, God be praised! there was not
one to be found in that vast city. Yet the work of these poor sufferers had
been light, if measured by minutes, but terrific when measured by hours.
[The material above was reprinted in an old history textbook, Readings in
European History Since 1814, edited by Jonathan F. Scott and Alexander
Baltzly, and was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts,
Inc. in 1930. The original sources of the material are listed in footnotes
in the book; I've put them in brackets after each subject heading. The
explanatory notes between sections are by Scott and Baltzly; the links were, of
course, added by me. --L.D.C.]