“Is it within your experience that a considerable number of young married women work in factories?” “A very large number.”
“You speak of the effect upon infant mortality; could you say anything of the effect upon the mothers themselves?” “I have no doubt that the health of the mothers will be damaged. It must be so, I am sure; that part of the subject has not engaged my attention so much as this terrible question of infant mortality.”
It may also be interesting to add the one question which was asked by the representative of the manufacturing interest, Mr. Tunstill, a cotton spinner—“Have you considered the financial question that is involved in this recommendation of yours?” And the answer, “I have purposely avoided that; I leave that to those much better able to judge of it than I am.”
Dr. Farr’s Tables.—It is most unfortunate that there should be such a lack of medical and statistical evidence as to the effect of factory labour upon the health of mothers. For this, I suppose, we shall have to wait for the gradual development of the human element in statistical science, though local medical evidence can be produced to shew the mischief that is constantly caused to the mother’s health. This question of infant mortality is at any rate beyond the region of the speculative, and all schools of thought, however divided they may be by the great controversy between freedom and the regulation of women’s labour, must be agreed that it would be nothing short of a national disgrace to allow matters to drift on year after year as they have been doing for many years past. It is now twenty years since Dr. Farr, the great health statistician, shewed the waste of life that was going on in the textile centres. He took the towns of Oldham, Nottingham, Manchester, Salford, Leeds, Norwich, Portsmouth, and London, found the number of women of twenty years and upwards who were engaged in the textile manufactures and household duties in each, and then worked out the particulars of infant mortality from 1873 to 1875. The result, which is to be found in a table in his work on Vital Statistics, is extremely striking. Thus, in Oldham, where 11,178 women were set down as engaged in textile manufacture, out of a total of 32,343 women of twenty years of age and upwards, the infant death rate per thousand births stood at 180; in Nottingham, where upwards of half the women were similarly employed, at 200; in Manchester and Salford, where a quarter of the women were engaged in textile manufacture, at 188; in Portsmouth, where there is no textile work, 146; and in London, where there is also none, 159.
Recent Statistics.—But in 1891 the infantile death rate in the worst textile towns exceeded any of the figures produced by Dr. Farr. Thus in Preston the mortality was 220. There is a slight improvement, but only slight, in the other towns investigated by Dr. Farr. Thus in Oldham the rate is 171 instead of 180, in Manchester 178 instead of 188. None of the figures that have been published, however, give anything like an adequate account of the real state of affairs. What we want is a statement confined to the children of those employed in any given industry where married women’s labour is prevalent. To take an entire town like Manchester or Salford is only to approximate to the facts. In both these towns there are healthy suburbs and large numbers of well-to-do people whose children are taken away every year to the seaside, and there are many industries which are healthy, and where no women’s labour is employed. But anyone who cares to take the trouble to examine the Registrar’s report, and to work out the death rates of the poorer quarters of Manchester and Salford, Bradford, Burnley, and Blackburn, or to take the Potteries and make similar calculations for Hanley, Burslem, and Stoke will be appalled by the contrast between the figures of those places and the rural death rate. He will find that, instead of being twice as high, the rate of infant mortality is even four or five times as high as in the country districts. Such figures as we have however, are sufficient, as I have said, to shew the close connection between the employment of mothers in mills and the death of children.
Deterioration of Survivors.—As to the deterioration of the survivors there can be no question. The evidence of Dr. Tarrop, quoted before, and of other certifying surgeons is conclusive on this point. That school of thought which frames its industrial policy on the theory of the survival of the fittest, can scarcely point to any very triumphant results in the districts which we have been considering. They may assert, and will no doubt continue to assert, that the wholesale sweeping-off of damaged lives in the early months is a great boon to the race, and that the survivors, having stood the ordeal, are presumably more or less seasoned for the discharge of their functions. It must be pointed out, however, that the tests applied are one and all unnatural ones, and that if the laws of nature are to be consulted we shall be right in assuming that the children who have died are those who were best fitted to live. For what are we to think of the standard of living which subjects all new-comers to their capacity of assimilating adulterated and unhealthy food, dispensing with maternal care, breathing air which is foul, and existing without sunshine? Yet this is the kind of test which the pseudo-scientists of the day are so proud of applying, and the result is a weedy, sickly, unnatural generation, brought up without regard to any one of the most fundamental laws of nature. It would be every bit as reasonable to evolve a system of botany which rejected, as extinct or dying, families of plants, which could not be cultivated in a dark chamber or in a refrigerator, as to create conditions of industrial life without reference to the laws of nature or the teachings of health, and then to argue that the fitness of the race depends upon compliance with them.
CHAPTER VIII.
LEGISLATION.
Factory Legislation Incomplete: Its intention—Sanitary and General Provisions—Causes of Inefficiency—Factory Acts a Compromise—Experts Required—Cubic Space Requirements—Reforms Needed: Health—Medical Examinations—Hygienic Regulations—Employment of Mothers—Need for Statistics—Hours of Labour: Abolition of Legal Overtime—Prevalence of Overtime—Overtime Unnecessary—Taking Work Home—Regulation of Outwork—Child Labour—Extension of the Factory Act Desirable—Laundresses—Nailmakers—Local and Imperial Authority—The Truck Act—Conclusion.