We used to start at half past five and work till eight at night. What time was allowed for breakfast and dinner and drinking? Forty minutes a day was all that was allowed. How were you kept up to your work during the latter part of the day? The overlooker used to come with a strap and give us a rap or two, or if they caught us asleep they would give us a pinch of snuff till we sneezed; they would give us a slap with a strap if we did not mind our work. Was the strap an instrument capable of hurting you badly? It was a heavy strap with a small handle to it. Where did they strike you with it? Generally in the small of the back and over the head. Did they strike the young children as well as the older ones? Yes. And the females as well as the males? Yes. State the effect upon your health of those long hours of labor. I was pretty fair in health but happened with two or three misfortunes. State, in the first place, the effect upon your health and limbs of those long hours of labor? It produced a weakness in my knees; I was made crooked with standing the long hours. Just show the gentlemen your limbs. (The witness exhibited to the committee his limbs, which appeared exceedingly crooked.) Are you quite sure you were, as a child, perfectly straight and well formed? Yes. How old were you before your limbs began to fail you? About eight years and a half old. Had you any brother or sister working at the mill? Yes, I had two sisters and a brother. Have those long hours of labor had any effect upon the rest of your family? Yes, upon one of my sisters. Is she crippled? She is nearly as bad as I am. Was she originally perfectly straight and well formed? Yes. To what age did she continue to be perfectly well formed? Till she was about nine years old. How tall are you? About four feet nine inches. Are you quite certain that the deformity of your limbs was not consequent upon the accident you had? No, it was not owing to that. You were deformed, as you are now, before that? Yes. Were the children unhappy at the state in which they were? Yes, they were. Have you seen them crying at their work? Yes. Had you time to go to a day school or a night school during this labor? No. Can Joseph Hebergam, aged 17; examined you write? No, not at all. Had you to work by gaslight? Where do you reside? At North Great Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Have you worked in factories? Yes. At what June 1, 1832 age did you commence? Seven years of age. At whose mill? George Addison Bradley's mill, near Huddersfield. What was the employment? Worsted spinning. What were your hours of labor at that mill? From five in the morning till eight at night. What intervals had you for refreshment? Thirty minutes at noon. Had you no time for breakfast or refreshment in the afternoon? No, not one minute; we had to eat our meals as we could, standing or otherwise. You had fourteen and a half hours of actual labor at seven years of age? Yes. What wages had you at that time? Two shillings and sixpence a week. Did you not become very drowsy and sleepy towards the end of the day, and feel much fatigued? Yes; that began about three o'clock and grew worse and worse, and it came to be very bad towards six and seven. . . . A foreman Do you live in Stockport? Yes. What has been your employment? A dresser of cotton yarn. In whose factory? In Mr. Robinson's. How many of the principal factories have you worked at? Mr. Ratcliffe's, Mr. Smith's, and Mr. Robinson's. How many hands do you think are employed in the spinning and weaving of cotton in the town and neighborhood of Stockport? At least 14,000. What proportion of those are children? I should think more than half. Are a considerable majority of those children females? Yes; more than half of the children employed in factories are females. What temperature do you have generally in the factory? It varies, but it is generally very high, as high as 80°, 90°, 100°, and 110°. Are any children employed in that temperature? Yes; there are children in those rooms. The warps are twisted and drawn in the dressing room, and there are children employed for those purposes. The chairman of the committee just referred to, Mr. Michael Sadler, who had become deeply interested in the question of factory labor, introduced a factory act based on the testimony taken by his committee. The following are passages from his address. The bill which I now implore the House to sanction with 424. Extracts its authority has for its object the liberation of children and from address introducing other young persons employed in the mills and factories of the factory act United Kingdom from that overexertion and long confine- of 1832 ment which common sense, as well as experience, has shown to be utterly inconsistent with the improvement of their minds, the preservation of their morals, and the maintenance of their health; in a word, to rescue them from a state of suffering and degradation, which it is conceived the children of the industrious classes in hardly any other country have ever endured. . . . But, I apprehend, the strongest objections that will be Objections to offered on this occasion will be grounded upon the pretense the principle of the bill that the very principle of the bill is an improper interference between the employer and the employed, and an attempt to regulate by law the market of labor. Were that market supplied by free agents, properly so denominated, I should fully participate in these objections. Theoretically, indeed, such is the case; but practically, I fear, the fact is far otherwise, even regarding those who are of mature age; and the boasted freedom of our laborers in many pursuits will, on a just view of their condition, be found little more than a name. Those who argue the question upon the mere abstract principle seem, in my apprehension, too much to forget the condition of society; the unequal division of property, or rather its total monopoly by the few, leaving the many nothing but what they can obtain by their daily labor, which very labor cannot become available for the purposes of daily subsistence without the consent of those who own the property of the community; all the materials, elements, call them what you please, on which labor can be bestowed, being in their possession. Hence it is clear Overseers of the poor press parents to send their children into the factories that, excepting in a state of things where the demand for labor They choose, therefore, what they probably deem the lesser evil, and reluctantly resign their offspring to the captivity and pollution of the mill. They rouse them in the winter morning, which, as a poor father testified before the Lords' Committee, they "feel very sorry" to do; they receive them fatigued and exhausted, many a weary hour after the day has closed; they see them droop and sicken, and, in many cases, become cripples and die, before they reach their prime; and they do all this because they must otherwise suffer unrelieved, and starve, like Ugolino, amidst their starving children. It is mockery to contend that these parents have a choice; that they can dictate to, or even parley with, the employer, as to the number of hours their child shall be worked or the treatment it shall be subject to in his mill. . . . An appeal to I trust, however, that this House, whose peculiar duty it is the humanity to defend the weak and redress the injured, will interpose and of parliament extend that protection to these defenseless children, which is equally demanded by the principles of justice, mercy, and policy. Many have been the struggles made in their behalf, but hitherto they have been defeated. The laws passed for their protection have been avowedly and shamefully evaded, and have therefore had little practical effect but to legalize cruelty and suffering. Hence, at this late hour, while I am thus feebly, but earnestly, pleading the cause of these oppressed children, what numbers of them are still tethered to their toil, confined in heated rooms, bathed in perspiration, stunned with the roar of revolving wheels, poisoned with the noxious effluvia of grease and gas, till, at last, weary and exhausted, they turn out, almost naked, into the inclement air, and creep, shivering, to beds from which a relay of their young work-fellows have just risen ! A typical instance of the other reforms of this period is the reduction of the price of postage and the introduction of the use of stamps by which the price is paid in advance. Some of the hardships of the old system are described in the following article in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1840, quoting some testimony recently collected by a parliamentary committee. system We are justified in saying that, for the great mass of our 425. The old countrymen, the post office does not exist; for the higher and post-office middle classes sink into nothing if measured by numbers against those below them; and it is only necessary to compare the income of a laboring man with his pressing wants, to see that it is idle to suppose he will apply his little surplus to the expensive enjoyment of post letters. It would be easy to fill pages with instances of pain and misery which result from there being no post office for the poor. We shall confine ourselves, however, to a few pregnant facts, drawn from the evidence. The postmaster at Banwell said: "My father kept the post Instances of office many years; he is lately dead; he used to trust poor fed to by hardship testipeople very often with letters; they generally could not pay postmasters the whole charge. He told me, indeed I know, he did lose many pounds by letting poor people have their letters. We sometimes return them to London, in consequence of the inability of the persons to whom they are addressed raising the postage. We frequently keep them for weeks, and, when we know the parties, let them have them, taking the chance of getting our money. One poor woman once offered my sister |