Conditions continued to become worse instead of better, children of both sexes being beaten and overworked to make profit for the rich capitalists until 1830, when Richard Oastler, who had led in the fight against black slavery, had his attention called to the conditions under which the children of England were practically enslaved.[453]
Oastler was talking one night about his slavery reforms to a friend near Bradford and the remark was made to him: “I wonder you never turned your attention to the factory.” “Why should I?” replied the young abolitionist, “I have nothing to do with factories.” “Perhaps not,” was the answer, “but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in the West Indies and I assure you that there are cruelties practised in our mills on little children which I am sure if you knew you would try to prevent.”
The man who gave this suggestion, John Wood, was himself an owner of a mill and he admitted to Oastler that in his own mill the little children were worked from six in the morning until seven at night with a break of only forty minutes for lunch and that various devices, including beatings with sticks and straps and clubs, were employed to goad them on to renewed labour.
The very next day Oastler began a crusade which lasted for many weary years. He succeeded in interesting J. Hobhouse and M. T. Sadler, both members of the House of Commons, and the ten hours agitation began in and out of Parliament. In the course of a speech delivered in March, 1832, in favour of the ten hours bill, Sadler declared that so great was the demand in some districts for children’s labour that “an indispensable condition of marriage among the working classes was the certainty of offspring whose wages, beginning at six years old, might keep their inhuman fathers and mothers in idleness.”
“Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible,” exclaimed Sadler, “posterity will not believe it true—that a generation of Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would work lisping infancy a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded.”
But, to the nation’s eternal disgrace, that generation of Englishmen did exist, and Mr. Sadler told the House, detail by detail, of the evils and outrages of the whole abominable system. Excessive hours, low wages, immorality, ill-health—all were enumerated, and then he continued:
“Then in order to keep them awake, to stimulate their exertions, means are made use of to which I shall now advert, as a last instance of the degradation to which this system has reduced the manufacturing operatives of this country. Children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, and I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten, beaten in your free market of labour as you term it, like slaves. The poor wretch is flogged before its companions, flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cartwhip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong in England.”[454]
Interesting too was the fact brought out at this time that while these were the conditions in England, in the colonies black labour was protected to the extent that nine hours a day was the legal day for adults and young persons and children were not allowed to work more than six, while night work was simply prohibited.
The investigation of the Sadler Committee evoked the interesting information from one witness that children were never employed if they were under five.