The Bitter Cry of the Children

by John Spargo

II

There is no more terrible page in history than that which records the enslavement of mere babies by the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century in England. Not even the crucifixion of twenty thousand slaves along the highways by Scipio excels it in horror.

Writing in 1795, Dr. Aikin gives a vivid account of the evils which had already been introduced in the factory districts by the new system of manufacture.[^[90]] He mentions the destruction of the best features of home life, the spread of filth, thriftlessness, poverty, and disease, and says that the demand for “children for the cotton mills” had become very great. To get children for the cotton mills was not easy at first. Parental love and pride were ranged against the new system, denying its demands. Accustomed to the old domestic system, the association of all the members of the family in manufacture as part of the domestic life, they regarded the new industrial forms with repugnance. It was considered a degradation for a child to be sent into the factories, especially for a girl, whose whole life would be blasted thereby. The term “factory girl” was an insulting epithet, and the young woman who bore it could not hope for other, better employment, nor yet for marriage with any but the very lowest and despised of men. Not till they were forced by sheer hunger and misery, through the reduction of wages to the level of starvation, could the respectable workers be induced to send their children into the factories. In the meantime they made war upon the “iron men,” as the machines were called, but of course in vain. To such a conflict there could be only one end,—human beings of flesh and blood could not prevail against the iron monsters, their competitors.

But the manufacturers wanted children, and they got them from the workhouses. It was not difficult to persuade Bumbledom to get rid of its pauper children, especially when its conscience was salved by the specious pretext that the children were to be taught new trades, as apprentices. “Alfred,” the anonymous author of the History of the Factory Movement,[^[91]] gives a thrilling description of the horrible inhumanity and wickedness of this practice of sending parish apprentices, “without remorse or inquiry, to be used up as the cheapest raw material in the market.” The mill owners would first communicate with the overseers of the poor, and the latter would fix suitable dates for the manufacturers or their agents to examine the children. Those chosen were then conveyed to their destination, closely packed in wagons or canal-boats. Thenceforth they were doomed to the most miserable slavery. A class of “traffickers” in child slaves arose. These men made a profitable business of supplying children to the manufacturers. They deposited their victims in dark, dank cellars, where the sales to the manufacturers or their agents were made. “The mill owners, by the light of lanterns being able to examine the children, their limbs and stature having undergone the necessary scrutiny, the bargain was struck, and these poor innocents were conveyed to the mills.” Their plight was appalling. They received no wages, and they were so cheap, their places so easily filled, that the mill owners did not even take the trouble to give them decent food or clothing. “In stench, in heated rooms, amid the 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 overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”

NEW YORK CELLAR PRISONERS
These children were found by Settlement Workers in New York City. Illegally employed, they were never
allowed to go out of doors, their only recreation being taken in a dark, filthy cellar.

Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice who, at seven years of age, was sent from a London workhouse to a cotton mill near Nottingham, gives a harrowing but well-authenticated account of actual experience.[^[92]] He tells how the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as that given to the master’s pigs, and how he and his fellow-victims used joyfully to say when they saw the swine being fed, “The pigs are served; it will be our turn next.” ... “When the swine were hungry,” he says, “they used to grunt so loud, they obtained the wash first to quiet them. The apprentices could be intimidated, and made to keep still.” Blincoe describes how, for fattening, the pigs were often given meat balls, or dumplings, in their wash, and how he and the other apprentices who were kept near the pigsties used to slip away and slyly steal as many of these dumplings from the pigs as possible, hastening away with them to a hiding-place, where they were greedily devoured. “The pigs ... learned from experience to guard their food by various expedients. Made wise by repeated losses, they kept a sharp lookout, and the moment they ascertained the approach of the half-famished apprentices, they set up so loud a chorus of snorts and grunts, it was heard in the kitchen, when out rushed the swineherd, armed with a whip, from which combined means of protection for the swine this accidental source of obtaining a good dinner was soon lost. Such was the contest carried on for some time at Litton Mill between the half-famished apprentices and the well-fed swine.”

The children were worked sixteen hours at a stretch, by day and by night. They slept by turns and relays in beds that were never allowed to cool, one set being sent to bed as soon as the others had gone to their toil. Children of both sexes and all ages, from five years upward, were indiscriminately herded together, with the result that vice and disease flourished. Sometimes the unfortunate victims would try to run away, and to prevent this all who were suspected of such a tendency had irons riveted on their ankles with long links reaching up to their hips. In these chains they were compelled to work and sleep, young women and girls as well as boys. Many children contrived to commit suicide, some were unquestionably beaten to death; the death-rate became so great that it became the custom to bury the bodies at night, secretly, lest a popular uprising be provoked.[^[93]]

Worse still, the cupidity of British Bumbledom was aroused, and it became the custom for overseers of the poor to insist that one imbecile child at least should be taken by the mill owner, or the trafficker, with every batch of twenty children. In this manner the parish got rid of the expense of maintaining its idiot children. What became of these unhappy idiots will probably never be known, but from the cruel fate of the children who were sane, we may judge how awful that of the poor imbeciles must have been.

Even in the one factory of the time which was heralded as a model for the manufacturers to copy, the mill at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale and afterward made famous by the great and good Robert Owen, his son-in-law, conditions were, from a twentieth-century point of view, simply shocking, despite the fact that it was the subject of glowing praise in the Annual Register for 1792, and that, like some of our modern factories, it had become generally regarded as a semi-philanthropic establishment. Robert Owen tells us in his autobiography that “children were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age.” These little children worked from six in the morning till seven in the evening, and after that they were supposed to be educated! “The poor children hated their slavery; many absconded; ... at thirteen or fifteen years old, when their apprenticeship expired, they commonly went off to Edinburgh or Glasgow, ... altogether admirably trained for swelling the mass of vice and misery in the towns.[^[94]] And all this while British philanthropists were agitating the question of negro emancipation, and raising funds for that object!”

Thanks, mainly, to the agitation of Owen, a movement was begun to endeavor to improve the lot of these little child slaves. This movement received a tremendous impetus from the fearful epidemic which, in 1799–1800, spread through the factory districts of Manchester and the surrounding country. An inquiry into the causes of this epidemic ascribed it to overwork, scant and poor food, wretched clothing, bad ventilation, and overcrowding, especially among the children.[^[95]] As a result the first act for the protection of child workers was passed through the parliamentary exertions of Sir Robert Peel, himself a master manufacturer. It was a very small measure of relief which this act afforded, but it is nevertheless a most important statute to students of industrial legislation as the “first definitely in restraint of modern factory labor and in general opposition to the laissez-faire policy in industry.”[^[96]] It was the first factory act ever passed by the British Parliament. It placed no limit upon the age at which children might be employed; it applied only to apprentices, and not to children “under the supervision of their parents;” it reduced the hours of labor to twelve per day, and provided for the clothing, instruction, and religious training of the children. These provisions were clearly a survival of an industrial system based upon paternal interest and authority.

One immediate effect of the act of 1802 was the practical break-up of the pauper apprentice system. But it must be remembered that this system was already outworn, and it is extremely improbable that it would have continued to any great extent, even if the act of 1802 had not been passed. It had served its purpose, but was no longer essential to the manufacturers.[^[97]] Notwithstanding that it introduced a revolutionary principle, as we have seen, the act excited no opposition from the manufacturers. The reason for this is not difficult to determine. Wages had been forced down to the starvation level through the competition of the pauper apprentices with free, adult labor, with the result that poverty abounded. Parents were ready now to send their children into the mills. Hunger had conquered their prejudices—the iron man had triumphed over human flesh and blood.

It is not my purpose to trace the growth of English legislation against child labor. This brief historical sketch is introduced for quite another purpose, to wit, to show the origin of our modern problem of child slavery and degradation. Suffice it to say, then, that the “free” children who went into the mills by their parents’ “consent” were almost as badly off as the pauper apprentices had been. They were treated just as brutally. Even in 1830, before a meeting of philanthropists and clergy in Bradford, Richard Oastler, the “King of the Factory Children,” could hold up an overseer’s whip, saying, “This was hard at work in this town last week.”[^[98]] And on the 16th of March, 1832, Michael Sadler, M.P., in moving the second reading of his Ten Hours Bill in the House of Commons, could say: “Sir, children are beaten with thongs prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten upon the arms, face, and bosom—beaten in your ‘free market’ of labour, as you term it, like slaves.... These are the instruments!” (Here, says the report in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, the honorable member exhibited some black, heavy leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House.) “They are quite equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young ... are pliant. The marks, however, are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart-whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling against the factory thong of England.”[^[99]] In some memorable verses this noble parliamentary leader of the movement for factory legislation has described such a whipping scene. The poem is too long to quote in its entirety:—

“‘Father, I’m up, but weary,

I scarce can reach the door,

And long the way and dreary—

Oh, carry me once more!’

“Her wasted form seemed nothing—

The load was at his heart,

The sufferer he kept soothing

Till at the mill they part.

The overlooker met her,

As to her frame she crept,

And with his thong he beat her

And cursed her as she wept.

“All night with tortured feeling,

He watched his speechless child,

While, close beside her kneeling,

She knew him not, nor smiled.

Again the factory’s ringing

Her last perceptions tried;

When, from her straw bed springing,

‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[^[100]]

A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage from the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided a child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of age), the overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and he touches the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the corner of the room is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes this boy, and holding him up by his legs, dips him overhead in the cistern, and sends him to his task for the remainder of the day; and that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his work—he has no chance of drying himself.”[^[101]]

Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of the introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the ancients believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and destroy every vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not been shattered, even by a century and a quarter of disappointment. Happily, we in the United States have been practically free from some of the worst evils of England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we have to-day a child-labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the heart and brain of the nation to find a solution. We, too, are permitting the giant “iron men” to enslave our babies. The machine is our modern Moloch, and we feed it with precious child lives.