At the meeting of the 7th of June, Dr. Mauthner sent in a report on the condition of the children employed in the cotton-works, in which he gave an exposition of the evidence, partly of his own experience and partly on the reports of others, of the moral and physical evils which the various branches of manufacture bring with them, and proposals were put into the hands of the owners of the mills for preventing the evils so strongly denounced.
The learned meeting determined to appoint a special commission to inquire into so grave and important a matter. This body held its first meeting on the 29th of July, at which our much-esteemed chairman presided, and I had the honour to be commissioned to inquire into that part of the report of Dr. Mauthner which treats more particularly of the effects of the cotton manufactures.
Before I enter upon the discussion on the special points of inquiry, permit me to lay before you a few general remarks on the nature of our inquiry, and of the condition of the people employed in the cotton-works, more particularly of Lower Austria. It must first be conceded that the condition of the children working in the factories is closely connected with the condition of the rest of the working population, and cannot be considered separately. Our president felt the necessity of considering them in connexion throughout the various parts of the inquiry which he had proposed to himself; and, before the commencement of our inquiry, it was generally agreed that our attention should extend also to the condition of the adult workpeople.
We could not conceal from ourselves that we were undertaking a subject at once the most important and the most delicate,—an inquiry which might disclose to the general public that the unhappy signs of the times were to be seen in our affairs, and which also, without cause, might alarm a very excitable class as to their own condition. English and French journals are full of the most striking descriptions of the physical and moral evils of the manufacturing population; and not without ground, as we learn from the various commissions of inquiry appointed by the respective governments. With your permission I will quote a passage from a report which the Commission de l’Intendance Sanataire du Nord drew up in the year 1832, and which unfortunately has not been found exaggerated even in later periods. It is word for word as follows:—
“No one without personal inspection can form any conception of the dwellings of our workpeople: the neglect in which they live brings evils with it which makes their misery unbearable, indeed almost fatal. Their poverty, by the negligence and demoralization which produces it, becomes almost destructive. In their dark cellars, in their cellar-like rooms, the air is never changed; it is perfectly poisonous. The walls are covered with filth. If a bed is ever found, it is always filthy, and made up of foul and rotten straw. It is covered with a coarse and dirty rag, the colour or material of which can hardly be distinguished; it is a miserable threadbare coverlet. The dirty and worm-eaten pieces of furniture and utensils are thrown about without any order; the closed windows scarcely allow any light to pass through their smoky panes, many of which are stuffed with paper, and (it will hardly be credited) they not unfrequently nail the window fast in order that it may run no risk of being broken in the opening and shutting of it. The floors of their houses are dirtier than the rest of the house, covered with ordure, ashes, rotten straw, and all that has been brought in from the filthy streets outside; it is a receptacle for every kind of vermin. The air is no longer fit to breathe; one feels in these abodes stunned with an overpowering and horrible stench, a smell of excrement, filth of every kind, and of human beings. And the inhabitant of these abodes, in what state is he? His clothes are in rags, and tossed on. His hair has never known a comb, and is covered with the material with which he is working; and his skin, though filthy, is yet distinguishable on his face, but on the other part of his body, concealed by his rags, there are accumulations of every kind. Nothing is so fearfully dirty as the old and wrinkled of these demoralised creatures. Their abdomens distended, their limbs distorted, their backs bent forward, their legs twisted, their necks scarred and full of swellings, their fingers festered, their joints swollen and weak, and, lastly, these unfortunate creatures are tormented, we may say eaten up, with vermin of all kinds.”
These descriptions were given by M. de Chambert, Boglli, Brigaudet, Kulman, and Themistocles Lestibuwers. I shall be excused for having given this long and disgusting extract, as it shows clearly what was the state and the evils which could call forth those general and loud complaints, and which made it a duty for government to take the matter into consideration. The whole picture is too wretched to be brought into the most distant comparison with the condition of the poorest of our workpeople, who are in general well fed and decently clothed, and show in the furniture of their cleanly-kept houses the fruits of their small earnings. They, together with their children, enjoy excellent health, and in general deserve the character of being a sober, industrious, orderly, tractable, and attached class. But a large population of workpeople, living entirely on the daily labour of their hands, wanting many things in external circumstances which, to the eye accustomed to luxury and abundance, are considered indispensable, under the continual pressure of strict regulations and continuous labour, is not a very enviable picture to the superficial observer, and often gives occasion to many unfounded lamentations and ill-timed apprehensions, if not to one-sided measures, which are, however, powerless against the stern necessity of supporting thousands of human beings, which are disturbing when they shake the established order of things, and are destructive when they make a happy and quiet class of workpeople discontented with their lot.
The cotton-works in Lower Austria, which are almost all situated within a circle of a few miles around Vienna, employ about 10,000 hands, for whose accommodation solid and roomy dwellings have been erected for the most part at the same time as the works were established.
Most of the mills have not only a considerable number of dwellings for the married workers, but large, separate sleeping-rooms for the unmarried of both sexes, which are provided with beds, and lighted and warmed at the expense of the mill. When the larger and older mills were built, there was erected for the boys and girls a so-called children’s house, in which, at that time, the children were provided at the expense of the mill with food, clothes, and instruction, and who were bound by certain regulations issued by the government, and were placed under the inspection of the respective clergyman and physician of the district. After the works were extended, they found they were obliged to give up these institutions; and they now drew the requisite number of hands, partly from the descendants of their own people, and partly from the children of the country people, who, in the course of time, becoming informed as to the condition of the children in the factories, send their own children after they are too big for home employment and to go to school, to work in the mills for a certain number of years; after which, however, they generally return to their agricultural labour. On the confines of Hungary, on a Sunday evening, hundreds of young, robust, and healthy workpeople, carrying with them the provisions for the week, may be seen coming to the mill, whence, on the Saturday evening, they may be seen going in merry groups carrying their wages back to their own homes. For these, and all who do not live with their parents, decent and proper rooms are provided, sometimes in that which used to be the children’s house, or in other places equally under inspection.
The employment in cotton mills, and more especially of the children, requires attention, and a certain quickness or sleight of hand more than any bodily exertion. The whole of the hands are employed in roomy and light apartments, which in summer are well ventilated, and in winter warmed with great regularity, and there is nothing in the material, nor in the processes of the manufacture, which can be injurious to the health. The hours of work, which are generally from four to five in the morning to seven or eight in the evening, are interrupted by three meal-times; and on Saturday the mill is closed from three to four hours earlier. The weekly wages of boys and girls are from 3 to 5 florins, and those of the adults from 6 to 18, besides a house free; and it is not only sufficient for their wants, but gives them also the means of laying by a little saving, examples of which are not unfrequent.
Under these circumstances the health is not, and cannot be, anything else than extremely good; the large number of old who are still robust and in employment, the experience and evidence of all the physicians who practise amongst the mill population, the result of the reports of the district physician, but above all, the healthy state they were in during several epidemics, and also the small proportion of deaths as seen in the parish register, all afford the most striking evidence of the fact of their healthiness. Every noxious circumstance must undoubtedly bear with it the traces of its evil; street riots, mobs of workpeople, and excesses of all kinds, breaches of the law and criminal acts, numerous and open concubinage, large numbers of illegitimate children (in many manufacturing towns amounting to one-fourth of the whole births), and, lastly, the large numbers of entirely destitute and disabled workpeople who seek for assistance from the parish and from all charities; these are the melancholy signs which mark in England and France the state of the manufacturing population.