VI
But you will say that, although this revolt in the better minds of England, a hundred years ago, may be a fact, I have as yet quoted but the evidence of a poetess and a novelist. Very well, then: I go to Blue Books and the reports of several commissions, reminding you that I lay most stress on the children because it happened through their almost inconceivable sufferings that, such as it was, victory came.
In 1831 Michael Sadler (a great man, in spite of Macaulay, and the ancestor of a great one—if I may insert this word of long admiration for the first senior man who spoke to me at my first undergraduate dinner in Hall, more than forty years ago)—in 1831 this Michael Sadler, member for Newark, introduced a Ten Hours Bill, and moved its second reading in a speech that roundly exposed, along with other woes of the poor, the sacrifice of child life in the mills. The Bill was allowed a second reading on condition that the whole subject should be referred to a Select Committee, over which Sadler presided.
Now let me quote a page from Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s recently published study of Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who, though so many have laughed at him, devoted his life that they should laugh if they chose, but willy-nilly on the right side of their mouths, and not with a grin unacceptable to any Divinity presumed as having created Man in His image—
The Report of Sadler’s Committee is a classical document; it is one of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of factory life at the time. Its pages bring before the reader in the vivid form of dialogue the kind of life that was led by the victims of the new system. Men and women who were old at twenty, from all the industrial districts, from Manchester, from Glasgow, from Huddersfield, from Dundee, from Bradford, from Leeds, passed before their rulers with their tale of weariness, misery, and diseased and twisted limbs. A worsted spinner of Huddersfield, Joseph Hebergram, aged seventeen, described his day’s work at the age of seven. His hours were from five in the morning to eight at night, with one solitary break of thirty minutes at noon. All other meals had to be taken in snatches, without any interruption of work. “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.” “What means were taken to keep you at your work so long?” “There were three overlookers; there was one a head overlooker, and there was one man kept to grease the machines, and there was one kept on purpose to strap.” His brother, who worked in the same mill, died at sixteen from spinal affection, due to his work, and he himself began to grow deformed after six months of it. “How far do you live from the mill?” “A good mile.” “Was it very painful for you to move?” “Yes, in the morning I could scarcely walk, and my brother and sister used, out of kindness, to take me under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.” Another witness, an overseer in a flax spinning mill at Dundee, said that there were nine workers in the room under his charge who had begun work before they were nine years old, and that six of them were splay-footed and the other three deformed in other ways. A tailor at Stanningley, Samuel Coulson, who had three daughters in the mill, described the life of his household when the mill was busy. In the ordinary time the hours were from six in the morning to half-past eight at night; in the brisk time, for six weeks in the year, these girls, the youngest of them “going eight,” worked from three in the morning to ten or half-past ten at night. “What was the length of time they could be in bed during those long hours?” “It was near eleven o’clock before we could get them into bed after getting a little victuals, and then at morning my mistress used to stop up all night, for fear that we could not get them ready for the time; sometimes we have gone to bed and one of us generally awoke.” “Were the children excessively fatigued by this labour?” “Many times; we have cried often when we have given them the little victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they have fallen asleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time.”
Another witness, Gillett Sharpe, described how his boy, who had been very active and a good runner, gradually lost the use of his limbs at the mill. “I had three steps up into my house, and I have seen that boy get hold of the sides of the door to assist his getting up into the house; many a one advised me to take him away; they said he would be ruined and made quite a cripple; but I was a poor man, and could not afford to take him away, having a large family, six children under my care.”
—and so on, and so on. Sadler forced the horrible tale upon Parliament. Unhappily, being pitted against Macaulay at Leeds in the General Election of 1832, he lost his seat, though Manchester sent an appeal signed by 40,000 factory-workers: and he never returned to the House of Commons. He died in 1835 at fifty-five, worn out by his work on behalf of these poor children.