One of the first results of machinery taking the place of human labour was that an enormous number of women and young children of both sexes were employed in the factories in place of grown men, who were no longer needed. Especially in the spinning mills thousands of men were thrown out of work, and lower wages were paid to those who took their place. This led directly to the breaking up of the home and home-life. The wives were often obliged to spend twelve to thirteen hours a day in the mills; the very young children, left to themselves, grew up like wild weeds and were often put out to nurse at a shilling or eighteenpence a day.
One reads of tired children driven to their work with blows; of children who, "too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite, that their parents found them kneeling by the bedside where they had fallen asleep during their prayers."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the greatest poets of Victoria's reign, pleads for mercy and human kindness in her "Cry of the Children."
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
"For oh," say the children, "we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round."
In the country the state of affairs was no better. New systems of industrial production threw large numbers of farm hands out of work, the rate of wages fell, and machinery, steam, and the work of women and children took the place of the labourer.
The children found a champion in Lord Ashley, afterward Lord Shaftesbury, who succeeded in the face of much opposition in his efforts to pass laws which should do away with such shameful wrong and injustice.
The increased amount of coal used (15½ million tons at the beginning of the century, 64½ million tons in 1854) naturally led to the demand for more workers, and it was owing to this that the proposals of Lord Shaftesbury met with such opposition from the mine-owners, who feared that if child labour were made illegal they would not have sufficient 'hands' to work the mines and that they would have to pay higher wages.
The Act of 1842 forbade altogether the employment of women and girls in the mines, and allowed only boys of the age of ten or more to do such work. The Poor Law Guardians of the time used to send children into the mines at the age of seven as a means of finding employment for them. The hours of work were limited to ten daily and fifty-eight each week.
Little or no attempt was made in the Bill to give children the means of obtaining a good education, although considerably more than half the children in the country never went to school at all, and many large towns were without a proper school.
By a previous Factory Act of 1834 all children under fourteen years of age were compelled to attend school for two hours daily. The employer was allowed to deduct one penny a week from the child's wages to pay the teacher. This proved absolutely useless, as the masters employed worn-out workers as teachers, and in consequence the children learnt nothing at all.