With this explanation we will now proceed to examine somewhat closely our moral position as a nation; what is the nature of our social environment; how it came to be what it is, and what lessons we may learn from it.
CHAPTER VIII
ENVIRONMENT DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
During the eighteenth century our material civilisation, which had long been almost stationary, began to advance with the growth of the physical sciences, but at first with extreme slowness. The earliest steps were made by the application of machinery to some of the domestic arts. Some refinements were made in the manners and customs of our daily life; but there were few, if any, indications of permanent or widespread change, either for better or worse, in our intellectual or moral nature.
The nineteenth century, however, saw the initiation of a great change in the economic environment due to the rapid invention of labour-saving machinery; which, with the equally rapid application of steam power, led to an increase of wealth production such as had never been known on the earth before. During the
same period new modes of locomotion were brought into daily use, the facilities for inter-communication were increased a hundred-fold, scientific discoveries opened up to us new and unthought-of mysteries of the universe, and the whole earth was ransacked for its treasures, both vegetable and mineral, to an extent that surpassed all that had been accomplished since the dawn of civilisation.
But this rapid growth of wealth, and increase of our power over Nature, put too great a strain upon our crude civilisation and our superficial Christianity, and it was accompanied by various forms of social immorality, almost as amazing and unprecedented. Some of these may be here briefly referred to.
Our vast textile factory system may be said to have commenced with the nineteenth century, and the profits were at first so large and so dependent on the supply of labour that the mill-owners hired children from the workhouses of the great cities by hundreds and even thousands. These children, from the age of five or six upwards, were taken as apprentices for seven years, and they really became the slaves of the manufacturers,