Beginning with factory operatives and their interests, nothing is easier than to follow the course of legislation on their behalf. The "Life of Lord Shaftesbury" is, in itself, the history of the movement for the protection of women and children,—a movement begun early in the present century, and made imperative by the hideous disclosures of oppression and outrage, not only among factory operatives, but the women and children in mining and other industries. Active as were his efforts and those of his colleagues, it is only within a generation that the fruit of their labor is plainly seen. As late as 1844, at the time Engel's notable book on "The Condition of the Working-Class in England" appeared, the labor of children of four and five years was still permitted; and women and children alike worked in mines, in brickyards, and other exposed and dangerous employments for the merest pittance. The pages of Engel's book swarm with incidents of individual and class misery; and while he admits fully, in the appendix prepared in 1886, that many of the evils enumerated have disappeared, he adds that for the mass of workers "the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, perhaps lower."
Year by year, in spite of constant agitation and the unceasing effort of Lord Shaftesbury to alter the worst abuses, these evils remained, and faced the examiner into social problems, slight ameliorations here and there serving chiefly to throw into darker relief the misery of the situation. Not only the philanthropist but officials joined hands; and in the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, each year added to the number and importance of the protests against an iniquitous system.
Chief among these protests ranked that against the overwork of pregnant mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing evils, W. Stanley Jevons, wrote, "infinite, irreparable wrong is done to helpless children," adding that the appalling infant mortality of the manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the public mind than the death of a single murderer. At nearly the same time Mr. F.W. Lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "The Destruction of Infancy;"[26] and this was supplemented by testimony from experts, the Statistical Society adding weighty testimony to the same effect.[27]
From these and other official testimony it was found that in nineteen manufacturing towns,[28] out of 1,023,896 children [Forty-first Report of the Registrar-General, p. 36] born, 82,259 died in infancy. The rate of mortality varied from 59.4 in Portsmouth through an ascending scale, being in London 78.6 and in Liverpool the almost incredible proportion of 103.6 per thousand. In a rural country infant mortality does not exceed from thirty-five to forty per thousand. The Report of the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life was filled with details so horrible that only the sworn testimony of experts made them credited at all.[29]
Dr. Hunter's report on rural mortality shows that when mothers are employed in what are known as "field gangs" for out-of-door work, leaving their children in the charge of old women too weak for such labor as their own, that infants died like sheep. Godfrey's Cordial was the chief engine of destruction; the corps of inspectors who reported to the Government finding infants in all stages of prostration, from the overdoses of the popular specific warranted to render any attention from nurse or mother quite unnecessary.
As to the direct effects of factory or out-door labor on pregnant mothers, out of 10,000 births among factory mothers, there died from 1863-75 of children under one year of age, in Portsmouth 1,459, Liverpool 2,189, London 1,591, and other towns with textile industries 1,940. Statistics taken in Germany and at other points all went to show that in the matter of out-door labor at the harvest season, when all women-workers are in the fields, the deaths of nursing infants were three times as great as in the other nine months.
For details and deduction from these facts the reader is referred to the reports themselves. "I go so far," wrote Mr. Jevons, "as to advocate the ultimate complete exclusion of mothers of children under the age of three years from factories and workshops;" and his conviction voiced that of every examiner into the situation as it stood at that time.
The Factory and Workshop Act came as partial solution to the many problems; and though regarded by the working-class as a mass of arbitrary restrictions whose usefulness they denied and in whose benefits they had no faith, it has actually proved the Great Charter of the working-classes. There are points still to be altered,—modifications made necessary by the constant change in methods of production, as well as in the enlarging sense of the ethical principles involved. But our own legislation is still far behind it at many points, and its work is done efficiently and thoroughly. Laws had been made, one by one, fifteen standing on the Statute Books in 1878, when all were abrogated, their essential features being codified in the Act as it stands to-day,—a genuine industrial code in one hundred and seven sections.
Up to this date violation of its provisions had been incessant; but determined enforcement brought about a uniform working day, protection of dangerous machinery, proper ventilation, improved sanitary conditions, an interdict on Sunday labor, and many other reforms in administration. Fourteen years have seen next to no change in the Act, and the condition of women and child workers in factories and workshops has come to be regarded as the best that modern systems of production admit. These workers, whose numbers now mount to hundreds of thousands, are a class apart, and for them legislation has accomplished all that legislation seems able to do in alleviating social miseries. Content with the results achieved, need of further effort in other directions failed of recognition, and apathy became the general condition.
It was during this season of repose that the public mind received first one shock and then another. "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London" appalled all who read; and leaf by leaf the new book of revelations disclosed always deeper depths of misery and want among all workers with the needle,—from the days of the fig-leaf the symbol of grinding toil and often hopeless misery.