This condition of affairs led to a new law, after a report which declared that of two thousand infants carried to Paris from the provinces, in all sorts of weather, by public vehicles without care or protection, three quarters had died within three months. The new law decreed that any wagoner bringing an infant to Paris to expose it would be fined one thousand livres. Inasmuch as the rule was made in the interest of the children, it was also decreed that abandoned children must be brought to the nearest hospital, and if that hospital declared that it had not enough funds to support the foundlings, the royal treasury might be drawn on.
CHAPTER XXII
RISE OF FACTORY SYSTEM—THE CHILD A CHARGE ON THE STATE—CHILDREN ACTUALLY SLAVES UNDER FACTORY SYSTEM—REFORM OF 1833—OASTLER AGAINST THE CHILD SLAVERY—“JUVENILE LABOUR IN FACTORIES IS A NATIONAL BLESSING”.
THE cannibalistic stage has passed and the day of sacrifice has passed—no longer is the child frankly a convenience nor is its life, as a result of past economic stress, a lightly considered trifle to be tossed into the cauldron of religious ceremony. Philosophy, humanity, civilization, and religion have combined to make the life of the child safe.
With what result?
The general belief that children were not regularly employed until the middle of the last century, when the factory system arose, had led to the equally erroneous belief that it was in the factory where the industrial abuse of children was first practised. In France where there was little industrial use for children in the large centres of population, where in other words children did not pay, the problem of modern humanity was to save infants from exposure and death. In England where there was an industrial use for them from early times, and where from the earliest times there are records of their abuse, there was no necessity for measures to protect them from infanticidal tendencies. But it is in England that we must study the ill-treatment of children that was brought about by the desire to make them useful.
The industrial records of the Middle Ages contain but few references[438] to children, for the adults were busy with their own troubles. One of the first of these notices was an order issued by the famous Richard Whittington, in 1398, and, although it is mixed with other considerations, it shows the human spark. It reads:
“Ordinances of the Hurers.