Espriella and his companions saw all the sights. They were taken to one of the great cotton manufactories and were shown a number of children at work there, the guide dwelling with satisfaction and delight on the infinite good resulting from employing infants at so early an age. “I listened,” says our horrified traveller, “without contradicting him, for who would lift up his voice against Diana at Ephesus!” and he left “with a feeling at heart which makes me thank God I am not an Englishman.”
“There is,” he continues, “a shrub in some of the East Indian islands which the French call veloutier; it exhales an odour that is agreeable at a distance, becomes less so as you draw nearer, and when you are quite close to it, is insupportably loathsome. Alciatus himself could not have imagined an emblem more appropriate to the commercial prosperity of England.”
CHILD LABOUR
“The guide remarked that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as manufactures. ‘You see these children, sir,’ said he. ‘In most parts of England poor children are a burden to their parents and to the parish; here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all expense; they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old, bring in money. There is no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.’
“I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion; and when he told me there was no rest in those walls, day or night, I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.
“‘These children, then,’ said I, ‘have no time to receive instruction.’
“‘That, sir,’ he replied, is the evil we have found. Girls are employed here from the age you see, till they marry, and then they know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or boil a potato. But we are remedying it now, and send the children to school for an hour after they have done work.’
“I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health.
“‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are as healthy as any children in the world. To be sure, many of them as they grow up go off in consumption, but consumption is the disease of the English.’”