Various mill-owners adopted children or took them under the apprentice system, agreeing to teach them the trade. Girls and boys from orphan asylums and workhouses were secured and held as practical slaves. They were herded in sheep-sheds, where they slept on straw and were fed in troughs. They were worked in two shifts, night and day, so the straw was never really cold. They worked twelve hours, slept eight, and one hour was allowed for meals. Their clothing was not removed except on Saturday. Any alteration in the business life of a people is fraught with great danger.
Recklessness, greed and brutality at such a time are rife.
Almost all workingmen of forty or over were out of work. Naturally, employers hired only the young, the active, the athletic. These made more money than they were used to making, so they spent it lavishly and foolishly. It was a prosperous time, yet, strangely enough, prosperity brought starvation to thousands. Family life in many instances was destroyed, and thus were built those long rows of houses, all alike, with no mark of individuality—no yard, no flowers, no gardens—that still in places mar the landscape in factory towns.
Pretty girls went to the towns to work in the mills, and thus lost home ties. Later they drifted to London. Drunkenness increased.
In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, there was formed the Manchester Board of Health. Its intent was to guard the interests of factory-workers. Its desire was to insure light, ventilation and sanitary conveniences for the workers. Beyond this it did not seek to go.
The mill superintendents lifted a howl. They talked about interference, and depriving the poor people of the right to labor. They declared it was all a private matter between themselves and the workers—a matter of contract.
Robert Owen, it seems, was the first factory superintendent to invite inspection of his plant. He worked with the Board of Health, not against it. He refused to employ children under ten years of age, and although there was a tax on windows, he supplied plenty of light and also fresh air. So great was the ignorance of the workers that they regarded the Factory Laws as an infringement on their rights. The greed and foolish fears of the mill-owners prompted them to put out the good old argument that a man's children were his own, and that for the State to dictate to him where they should work, when and how, was a species of tyranny. Work was good for children! Let them run the streets? Never!
It is a curious thing to note that when Senator Albert J. Beveridge endeavored to have a Federal Bill passed at Washington, in Nineteen Hundred Seven, the arguments he had to meet and answer were those which Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel were obliged to answer in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five.
When a man who worked a hundred orphans fourteen hours a day, boys and girls of from six to twelve, was accused of cruelty, he defended himself by saying, "If I doesn't work 'em all the time 'cept when they sleep and eat, they will learn to play, and then never work." This argument was repeated by many fond parents as conclusive.
The stress of the times—having many machines in one building, all run by one motor power, the necessity of buying raw material in quantities, the expense of finding a market—all these combined to force the invention of a very curious economic expediency. It was called a Joint Stock Company. From a man and his wife and his children making things at home, we get two or three men going into partnership and hiring a few of their neighbors at day wages.