CHAPTER IV. The Factory System and Its Results

THE FACTORY SYSTEM AND ITS RESULTS

§ 1. THE RESULTS OF THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM--The great war of which I have just spoken in the preceding chapter found England at its beginning a nation whose mainstay was agriculture, with manufactures increasing, it is true, but still only of secondary importance. At the commencement of the war, English workers spun and wove in their cottages; at its close they were herded together in factories, and were the servants of machinery. The capitalist element had become the main feature in production, and the capitalist manufacturers the main figures in English industry, rivalling and often overtopping the landed gentry. But a man cannot become a capitalist without capital, and capital cannot be accumulated without labour; though these remarkably obvious facts are constantly forgotten. The large capitalists of earlier manufacturing days obtained their capital, after the first small beginnings, from the wealth produced by their workmen and from their own acuteness in availing themselves of new inventions. Of the wealth produced by their workmen they took nearly the whole, leaving their employés only enough to live upon while producing {177} more wealth for their masters. Hence it may be said that capital was in this case the result of abstinence, though the abstinence was on the part of the workman and not of his employer, as we shall shortly see.

This, then, was the immediate result of the factory system: the growth of large accumulations of capital in the hands of the new master manufacturers, who with their new machinery, undisturbed by internal war, were able to supply the nations of Europe with clothing at a time when these nations were too much occupied in internecine conflicts on their own soil to produce food and clothing for themselves. Even Napoleon, in spite of all his edicts directed against English trade, was fain to clothe his soldiers in Yorkshire stuffs when he led them to Moscow. It was no wonder that the growth of capital was rapid and enormous. Other results followed. The formerly widespread cottage industry was now aggregated into a few districts, nearly all in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Persons of all ages and both sexes were collected together in huge buildings, under no moral control, with no arrangements for the preservation of health, comfort, or decency. The enormous extension of trade rendered extra work necessary, and the mills ran all night long as well as by day. The machines made “to shorten labour” resulted in many cases in vastly extending it; while in others again they took away all the means of livelihood from the old class of hand-workers. Hence riots frequently occurred, and the labourers sought to destroy the new machinery; the struggle of what were called “the iron men” against human beings of flesh and blood long continued to be a source of controversy and complaint, more especially as the workmen saw that the profits made by these iron men went almost entirely into the hands of their masters. {178}

§ 2. CONTEMPORARY EVIDENCE OF THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS--A very good idea of the effects of the introduction of the factory system upon the operatives may be formed from a resolution unanimously adopted by the magistrates at the quarter sessions of Preston, in Lancashire, dated November 11th, 1779, wherein it was “resolved: That the sole cause of great riots was the new machines employed in the cotton manufacture: That the county [i.e. the manufacturers] had greatly benefited by their erection, and that the destroying them in one county only led to their erection in another; and that if a total stop were put by the legislature to their erection in Britain it would only tend to their establishment in foreign countries, to the detriment of the trade in Britain.” But better than the cold words of a formal resolution is the description of the country round Manchester published in 1795 by a Dr Aikin. He points out what we have already referred to, that “the sudden invention and improvement of machines to shorten labour have had a surprising influence to extend our trade, and also to call in hands from all parts, particularly children for the cotton mills.” He says that domestic life is seriously endangered by the extensive employment of women and girls in the mills, for they had become ignorant of all household duties. “The females are wholly uninstructed in knitting, sewing, and other domestic affairs requisite to make them frugal wives and mothers. This is a very great misfortune to them and to the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the labourers in husbandry, and those of manufacturers in general. In the former we meet with neatness, cleanliness, and comfort; in the latter with filth, rags, and poverty.” He also mentions the great prevalence of fevers among employés in cotton mills, consequent upon the utterly unsanitary {179} conditions under which they laboured. But nowhere were the evils which accompanied the sudden growth of wealth and of industry so marked as in the case of those miserable beings who were brought to labour in the new mills under the apprentice system. Their life was literally and without exaggeration simply that of slaves.

§ 3. ENGLISH SLAVERY. THE APPRENTICE SYSTEM--When factories were first built there was a strong repugnance on the part of parents who had been accustomed to the old family life under the domestic system to send their children into these places. It was in fact considered a disgrace so to do: the epithet of “factory girl” was the most insulting that could be applied to a young woman, and girls who had once been in a factory could never find employment elsewhere. It was not until the wages of the workman had been reduced to a starvation level that they consented to their children and wives being employed in the mills. But the manufacturers wanted labour by some means or other, and they got it. They got it from the workhouses. They sent for parish apprentices from all parts of England, and pretended to apprentice them to the new employments just introduced. The mill-owners systematically communicated with the overseers of the poor, who arranged a day for the inspection of pauper children. Those chosen by the manufacturer were then conveyed by wagons or canal boats to their destination, and from that moment were doomed to slavery. Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill-owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave-dealers in the American markets. {180} After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed or clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill-owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. Their treatment was most inhuman. The hours of their labour were only limited by exhaustion after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the machinery. The author of The History of the Factory Movement writes: “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 over-looker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.” They were fed upon the coarsest and cheapest food, often with the same as that served out to the pigs of their master. They slept by turns and in relays, in filthy beds which were never cool; for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon as the others had gone off to their daily or nightly toil. There was often no discrimination of sexes; and disease, misery and vice grew as in a {181} hotbed of contagion. Some of these miserable beings tried to run away. To prevent their doing so, those suspected of this tendency had irons riveted on their ankles with long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to work and sleep in these chains, young women and girls as well as boys suffering this brutal treatment. Many died and were buried secretly at night in some desolate spot, lest people should notice the number of the graves; and many committed suicide. The catalogue of cruelty and misery is too long to recite here; it may be read in the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice, or in the pages of the Blue-books of the beginning of this century, in which even the methodical dry official language is startled into life by the misery it has to relate. It is perhaps not well for me to say more about the subject, for one dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told about this awful page in the history of industrial England. I need only remark, that during this period of unheeded and ghastly suffering in the mills of our native land, the British philanthropist was occupying himself with agitating for the relief of the very largely imaginary woes of negro slaves in other countries. He of course succeeded in raising the usual amount of sentiment, and perhaps more than the usual amount of money on behalf of an inferior and barbaric race, who have repaid him by relapsing into a contented indolence and a scarcely concealed savagery which have gone far to ruin our possessions in the West Indies. The spectacle of England buying the freedom of black slaves by riches drawn from the labour of her white ones, affords an interesting study for the cynical philosopher.

§ 4. THE BEGINNING OF THE FACTORY AGITATION--The state of things in factories where large numbers of apprentices {182} were employed became so bad, that at last something had to be done. In 1802 an Act was passed “for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills.” It is a significant fact, that the immediate cause of this Bill was the fearful spread through the factory districts of Manchester of epidemic disease, owing to the overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, and overcrowding in unhealthy dwellings of the workpeople, especially the children. The hours of work were “reduced” to only 12 per day. This Act, however, did not apply to children residing near the factory where they were employed, for they were supposed to be “under the supervision of their parents.” The result was that, although the apprentice system was discontinued, other children came to work in the mills, and were treated almost as brutally, though luckily they were not entirely in the hands of their master. But the evils of this system of child labour were very great. During the whole of the period of 1800 to 1820, and even to 1840, the results of their sufferings were seen in the early deaths of the majority of children and in the crippled and distorted forms of the majority of those who survived. On the women and grown-up girls the effects of long hours and wearisome work were equally disastrous. A curious inversion of the proper order of things was seen in the domestic economy of the victims of this cheap labour system, for women and girls were superseding men in manufacturing labour, and, in consequence, their husbands had often to attend, in a shiftless, slovenly fashion, to those household duties which mothers and daughters hard at work in the factories were unable to fulfil. Worse still, mothers and fathers in some cases lived upon the killing labour of their little children, by letting them out {183} to hire to manufacturers, who found them cheaper than their parents.

The factory hands in general, and the children in particular, at length found help from a few philanthropists who had not allowed themselves to be dazzled by the glowing eloquence of the agitators against black slavery. Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, and Richard Oastler must in especial be mentioned as the champions of the mill-hands. Long years after Lord Shaftesbury had succeeded in his noble work, he spoke of the sad sights he had seen during his earlier labours in the factory districts. “Well can I recollect,” he said in a speech in the House of Lords in 1873, “in the earlier periods of the factory movement, waiting at the factory gates to see the children come out, and a set of sad, dejected, cadaverous creatures they were. In Bradford especially the proofs of long and cruel toil were most remarkable. The cripples and distorted forms might be numbered by hundreds, perhaps by thousands. A friend of mine collected a vast number together for me; the sight was most piteous, the deformities incredible. They seemed to me, such were their crooked shapes, like a mass of crooked alphabets.” A corroboration of his words is found in one of Southey’s letters to Mr May (written March 1st, 1833), in which, speaking of factory labour, he remarked with justice: “the slave trade is mercy compared to it.”

The companion of the famous Lord Shaftesbury in the factory agitation was Richard Oastler, who was born in 1789 and died in 1861, and at first, especially in 1807, was a great supporter of Wilberforce in his anti-slavery agitation. But, living as he did in the factory districts of Yorkshire, he discovered a worse slavery existing at his very doors, and at once decided to do his best to put a stop to it. From 1829 to 1832 he was the leader of the {184} movement for a “ten hours day,” and from 1830 to 1847 he devoted himself especially to stopping the oppression of children in factories, till he caused the Factories Regulation Acts to be passed. A short reference to these Factory Acts will not be out of place.

§ 5. THE VARIOUS FACTORY ACTS--After the Act of 1802 already referred to for improving the condition of apprentices, an Act for the regulation of work in cotton mills was passed in 1819, allowing no child to be admitted into a factory before the age of nine, and placing 12 hours a day as the limit of work for those between the ages of nine and sixteen. The day was really one of 13⁠½ or 14 hours, because no meal-times were included in the working day. Then again in 1831 an Act was passed forbidding night-work in factories for persons between nine and twenty-one years of age, while the working day for persons under eighteen was to be 12 hours a day, and 9 hours on Saturdays. But this legislation only applied to cotton factories; those engaged in the manufacture of wool were quite untouched, and matters there were as bad as ever. But a spirit of agitation was fortunately abroad in the country. These were the days of the Reform Bill and of the rise of Trade Unions. These unions of workmen cried out for the restriction of non-adult labour to 10 hours a day, and the Conservative party, who were chiefly interested in the land and not in the mills, supported them readily against the manufacturers, who were mainly Liberals and Radicals. The two most important Acts were those of 1833 and 1847. That of 1833, introduced by Lord Shaftesbury, prohibited night-work to persons under eighteen in both cotton, wool, and other factories; children from nine to thirteen years of age were not to work more than 48 hours a week, and young persons from thirteen to {185} eighteen years were to work only 68 hours. Provision was also made for the children’s attendance at school, and for the appointment of factory inspectors. These restrictions in the employment of children led to a great increase in the use of improved machinery to make up for the loss of their labour, and it is probable that they accelerated the use of steam power instead of water power in the smaller and more old-fashioned mills. Then, after one or two minor Acts, the famous Ten Hours Bill (10 Vict. c. 29) was passed in 1847, which reduced the labour of women and young persons to 10 hours a day, the legal day being between 5.30 A.M. and 8.30 P.M. Manufacturers tried to avoid the provisions of this Bill by working persons thus protected in relays, but this was stopped by the fixing of a uniform working day in 1850, so that young persons and women could only work between the hours of 6 A.M. and 6 P.M., and on Saturdays only till 2 P.M. Since the passing of these Acts a great many much needed extensions of their provisions to other industries have been made, and in 1874 the minimum age at which a child could be admitted to a factory was fixed at ten years. The limitation of the labour of women and young persons necessarily involved the limitation of men’s labour, because their work could not be done without female aid. Thus the ten hours day at last became universal in factories.

§ 6. HOW THESE ACTS WERE PASSED--It is curious to notice how these Acts were passed. They all showed the steady advance of the principle of State interference with labour; a doctrine most distasteful to the old Ricardian school of economists, even when that interference was made in the interests of the physical and moral well-being, not only of the industrial classes, but of the community at large. Hence the economists of the day aided the {186} manufacturers in opposing these Acts to the utmost of their power, and the laws passed were due to the action of the Tories and land-owners. Lord Shaftesbury, Fielden, Oastler, and Sadler were all Tories, though they were accused of being Socialists. They were supported by the landed gentry. But the mill-owners had their revenge afterwards when they helped to repeal the Corn Laws in spite of the protest of the landlords, who did not mind the workmen having shorter hours at other people’s expense, but objected to their having cheap bread at their own. The working classes cannot fail to observe that each party was their friend only in so far as they could injure their opponents, or at least do no harm to themselves. John Bright especially distinguished himself (Feb. 10, 1847) by his violent denunciation of the Ten Hours Bill, which he characterized as “one of the worst measures ever passed in the shape of an Act of the legislature.” In 1908 a Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill was passed into law.

But when we look back upon the degradation and oppression from which the industrial classes were rescued by this agitation, we can understand why Arnold Toynbee said so earnestly: “I tremble to think what this country would have been but for the Factory Acts.” They form one of the most interesting pages in the history of industry, for they show how fearful may be the results of a purely capitalist and competitive industrial system, unless the wage-earners are in a position to act as an effectual check upon the greed of an unscrupulous employer.

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