Curse of the Factory System

John Fielden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136238208
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

First published in 1969, John Fielden was a businessman, Radical, humanitarian and Parliamentarian, often bored haughty politicians and shocked respectable middle-class opinion. This is a reprint of his work Curse of the factory system', or 'A short account of the origin of factory cruelties; of the attempts to protect the children by law; of their present sufferings; our duty towards them; injustice of Mr Thomson's Bill; the folly of the political economists, a warning against sending the children of the South into the factories of the North.'

THE CURSE

OF

THE FACTORY SYSTEM.

ON the 27th of February last, I received a copy of a memorial addressed by certain Manufacturers of the Borough of Oldham to “The Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for Trade, &c. &c.” together with a request in writing, that I would go with my colleague, Mr. LEES, to whom the original was sent, and support the request of the memorialists. As this document came from a part of my own constituents, I felt bound to comply with their request, unless it was contrary to my own convictions, and, finding it to be so, I wrote to them to that effect. A copy of the memorial and of the correspondence I will now insert :

Oldham, 25 th February, 1836.

SIR,

I am instructed by the Master Spinners and Manufacturers in this Township to forward you the inclosed copy of a Memorial, the original o which has this day been forwarded to JOHN FREDERICK LEES, Esq., one of the Members for this Borough, for presentation to the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for Trade, and to solicit your assistance and influence in obtaining an alteration of the present Factory Regulation Act.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

KAY CLEGG.

John Fielden, Esq., M.P.,

“House of Commons, London.”

To the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for

Trade, &c. &c.

The Memorial of the Undersigned Mill-owners, Occupiers of Mills,

Master-Spinners, and Manufacturers of the Township of Oldham, in

the County of Lancaster,

Showeth,

That an Act of Parliament was made and passed in the third and fourth years of the reign of his present Majesty, entitled ‘ An Act to regulate the labour of children and young persons in the Mills and Factories of ‘the United Kingdom.’

That the eighth section of the said Act enacts ‘ That after the expiration ‘of thirty months from the passing of such Act it shall not be lawful for ‘ any person whatsoever to employ, keep, or allow to remain, in any factory ‘ or mill for a longer period than forty-eight hours in any one week, any ‘ child who shall not have completed his or her thirteenth year of age.’

That the said Act has prohibited the employment of children under twelve years of age for more than nine hours in any one day since the first day of March one thousand eight hundred and thirty-five, and such prohibition has tended greatly to injure the interests both of your Memorialists and the parents of such children, without any advantage resulting to the children themselves.

That your Memorialists are looking forward with great anxiety and alarm to the situation in which they will be placed on the first day of March next, by the working of children under thirteen years of age being restricted to forty-eight hours in one week, for that such restriction will have the effect of throwing all children under thirteen years of age wholly out of employment, and will render it impossible for your Memorialists to work their respective mills with advantage, in proof whereof your Memo-”rialists confidently appeal to the Factory Inspectors of this district for the truth of their assertion.

That your Memorialists are far from wishing a total repeal of the provisions of the said Factory Act, but humbly submit that it is absolutely necessary to the carrying on of the cotton trade with advantage, to allow the employment of children of eleven years of age for sixty-nine hours a week.

That your Memorialists approve of the principle of appointing responsible superintend ents over the mills and factories of the United Kingdom, and are favourable to a restriction of the employment of young persons under twenty-one years of age to sixty-nine hours in the week.

Your Memorialists, therefore, pray that a Bill may be forthwith introduced by his Majesty's Government, which shall prevent the latter part of the above-mentioned section from coming into operation on the first of March next, and which shall permit children of eleven years of age to be employed for sixty-nine hours per week in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom.

This memorial is signed by seventy-two mill-owners, bat I do not think it necessary to publish their names. The following is the answer that I returned to Mr. Clegg:—

London, Feb. 29, 1836.

SIR, I have received your letter of the 27th, and a copy of the me morial sent to Mr. LEES.

The prayer of the Memorialists, that young children between eleven and thirteen years of age should be allowed to work in factories sixty-nine hours in the week, instead of forty-eight hours a week, which the law now prescribes, is so revolting to my feelings, and so opposed to my views of the protection such children are entitled to, that I must decline supporting the prayer of the Memorialists.

The work-people have long petitioned that the maximum of time for those under twenty-one should be fifty-eight hours per week. This I should be glad to see adopted, as an experiment, and would support such a proposition by my vote; but I do not think the restriction is sufficient.

I am embarked in the same business with the Memorialists. I have had long experience in it. I have paid great attention to this question; and, after mature consideration of it, I am convinced that eight hours work per day, in factories, is as long as ought to be exacted from either children or adults; and I am of opinion, too, that such a regulation, combined with a daily system of training and instruction, would be more advantageous both to masters and servants, than the regulation now in practice. But the subject is so important, and is likely to be brought under the consideration of Parliament so soon, that I propose to publish my opinions and the reasons for those opinions, and the conclusions I have come to on this question, in reply to the Memorialists.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

JOHN FIELDEN.

“Klay Clegg, Esq. Oldham.”

Whether owing to the recommendation of the memorialists, or not, I do not know; but Mr.POULBTT THOMSON has brought in a bill to repeal so much of the Act 3rd and 4th W. 4. c. 103 as prohibits the working of children under thirteen years of age beyond eight hours a day. But it is necessary that I should state the circumstances under which this Act was passed.

The late Mr. SADLER, in 1832, attempted to pass an act through the House of Commons, providing that no person under eighteen years of age should work more than ten hours a day in factories. He failed, and was not returned to the succeeding Parliament of 1833; but Lord Ashley took up the subject, brought in a ten-hour bill, and had proceeded with it to the second reading, when on the 3rd of April, 1833, Mr. WILSON PATTEN moved as an amendment that a Commission should be appointed to take evidence as to the expediency of the measure. The Commissioners went forth, and the result was, a report in which they state distinctly (pp. 33,34) that Lord Ashley's bill for restriction to ten hours’ labour will not afford a sufficient protection to children, and then they go on to recommend as follows :

“That children tinder nine years of age shall not be employed in mills or factories, subject, however, to the considerations hereinafter stated. That, until the commencement of the fourteenth year, the hours of labour during any one day shall not in any case exceed eight. That, until the commencement of the fourteenth year, children shall not in any case be allowed to work at night; that is to say, between the hours of ten at night and five in the morning.”—[p. 52.]

The Act above-named was passed, and, according to Section VIII., its operation was to be gradual; that is to say, no child who had not completed its eleventh year, was to work more than eight hours a day after the 1st March, 1834; and, in the same manner, no child who had not completed its twelfth year, was to work a longer time than eight hours in a day after the 1st March, 1835; and, on the 1st March,1836, no child who had not completed its thirteenth year, was to work more than eight hours in the day. And it is this last provision that the Bill introduced by the Right Hon. the President of the Board of Trade is intended to repeal.

Against this repeal I protest; for it is taking from an unoffending and feeble part of the labouring classes the main provision of a law which, in some shape or another, has been called for for these thirty years, not only by the unfortunate people themselves, but by some of the wealthiest and most considerate masters, who have been put to shame by the just but unsparing remonstrances of a host of the most eminent physicians and surgeons in England,

In tracing the progress which has been made in the attempts to better the condition of factory children, it may not be amiss to inquire how it came to pass originally, that, in England, always boasting of her humanity, laws were necessary in order to protect little children from the cruelties of the master manufacturer, and even of their own parents.

It is well known that ARKWRIGHT'S (so called, at least) inventions took manufactures out of the cottages and farmhouses of England, where they had been carried on by mothers, or by daughters under the mother's eye, and assembled them in the counties of Derbyshire, Nottingham-shire, and, more particularly, in Lancashire, where the newly-invented machinery was used in large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from towns; and Lancashire, in particular, being till then but comparatively thinly populated and barren, a population was all she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of little children being by very far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little hapless creatures were sent down into the North, being from the age of seven, to the age of thirteen or fourteen years old. The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices, and to feed and lodge them in an apprentice house near the factory; overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence; and there is abundant evidence on record, and preserved in the recollections of some who still live, to show, that, in many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong, cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; that they were hapassed to the brink of death by excess of labour, that they were flogged, fettered, and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; that they were, in many cases, starved to the bone while flogged to their work, and that even in some instances, they were driven to commit suicide to evade the cruelties of a world, in which, though born to it so recently, their happiest moments had been passed in the garb and coercion of a workhouse. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder!^*

The profits of manufactures were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility of limit: they began the practice of what is termed “night working,” that is, having tired out one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted, and, in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the beds never got cold! These outrages on nature Nature herself took in hand; she would not tolerate this; and accordingly she stepped forth with an ominous and awful warning : contagious malignant fevers broke out, and began to spread their ravages around; neighbourhoods became alarmed; correspondences appeared in the newspapers, and a feeling of general horror was excited when the atrocities committed in those remote glens became even partially known. The masters themselves, proof against the dictates of ordinary humanity, were not proof against malignant fevers, nor strong enough to set the public voice at defiance, and therefore they instituted a Board of Health in Manchester, which made the following Report in 1796 :—

“It has already been stated, that the objects of the present institution are to prevent the generation of diseases; to obviate the spreading of them by contagion; and to shorten the duration of those which exist, by affording the necessary aids and comforts to the sick. In the prosecution of this interesting undertaking, the Board have had their attention particularly directed to the large cotton factories established in the town and neighbourhood of Manchester; and they feel it a duty incumbent on them to lay before the public the result of their inquiries :—1. It appears that the children and others who work in the large cotton factories are peculiarly disposed to be affected by the contagion of fever; and that when such infection is received it is rapidly propagated, not only amongst those who are crowded ‘‘ together in the same apartments, but in the families and neighbourhoods to which they belong. 2. The large factories are generally injurious to the constitution of those employed in them, even where no particular diseases prevail, from the close confinement which is enjoined, from the debilitating effects of hot or impure air, and from want of the active exercises which nature points out as essential in childhood and youth, to invigorate the system, and to fit our species for the employments and for the duties of manhood. 3. The untimely labour of the night, and the protracted labour of the day, with respect to children, not only tends to diminish future expectations as to the general sum of life and industry, by impairing the strength and destroying the vital stamina of the rising generation, but it too often gives encouragement to idleness, extravagance, and profligacy in parents, who, contrary to the order of nature, subsist by the oppression of their offspring. It appears that children employed in factories are generally debarred from all opportunities of education, and from moral or religious instruction. 5. Prom the excellent regulations which exist in several cotton factories, it appears that many of these evils may, in a considerable degree, be obviated; we are therefore warranted by experience, and we are assured we shall have the support of the liberal proprietors of these factories, in proposing an application for Parliamentary aid (if other methods appear not likely to effect the purpose), to establish a general system of laws tor the wise, humane, and equal government of all such works.”

Nothing was done, however, till 1802, when the late Sir ROBERT PEEL, being a Member of the House of Commons, procured an Act (42 Geo. 3. c. 73) to regulate the labour of apprentice children worked in factories; but the evidence on which that Act is founded (if any there was) I have never been able to procure. However, from the circumstance of the provisions of the Act being limited to apprentices, as well as f...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction To The Second Edition
• The Curse of The Factory System
• Preface
• The Curse of The Factory System