The work of improvement went on, and the power-loom came; “weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves” in a well-nigh literal sense. The great machine tool became an accomplished fact. It had been forged upon the anvil of human necessity through countless centuries. But the revolution it wrought, or, rather, the revolution of which it was the expression, was not a revolution of liberation. A hundred and twenty years have elapsed since then, and still the prophecy of freedom has not been fulfilled; there are still “slaves for the lords.”
“Fast and faster, our iron master,
The thing we made, for ever drives,
Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure,
For other hopes and other lives.”
Children have always worked, but it is only since the reign of the machine that their work has been synonymous with slavery. Under the old form of simple, domestic industry even the very young children were assigned their share of the work in the family. But this form of child labor was a good and wholesome thing. There may have been abuses; children may have suffered from the ignorance, cupidity, and brutality of fathers and mothers, but in the main the child’s share in the work of the family was a good thing. In the first place, the child was associated in its work with one or both of its parents, and thus kept under all those influences which we deem of most worth, the influences of home and parental care. Secondly, the work of the child constituted a major part of its education. And it was no mean education, either, which gave the world generation after generation of glorious craftsmen. The seventeenth-century glass-blower of Venice or Murano, for instance, learned his craft from his father in this manner, and in turn taught it to his son. There was a bond of interest between them; a parental pride and interest on the part of the father infinitely greater and more potent for good than any commercial relation would have allowed. On the part of the child, too, there was a filial pride and devotion which found its expression in a spirit of emulation, the spirit out of which all the rich glory of that wonderfully rich craft was born. So, too, it was with the potters of ancient Greece, and with the tapestry weavers of fourteenth-century France. In the golden age of the craftsman, child labor was child training in the noblest and best sense. The training of hand and heart and brain was the end achieved, even where it was not the sole purpose of the child’s labor.
But with the coming of the machine age all this was changed. The craftsman was supplanted by the tireless, soulless machine. The child still worked, but in a great factory throbbing with the vibration of swift, intricate machines. In place of parental interest and affection there was the harsh, pitiless authority of an employer or his agent, looking, not to the child’s well-being and skill as an artificer, but to the supplying of a great, ever widening market for cash gain.
It is not without its significance that the ribbon-loom which in the latter part of the seventeenth century caused the workmen of England to riot, the same machine which, later, was publicly burnt in Hamburg by order of the Senate, should have been described as “enabling a totally inexperienced boy” to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, “by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards.”[[89]] It was as though the new mechanical invention had been designed with the express purpose of laying the burden of the world’s work upon child shoulders; as though some evil genius had deliberately contrived that the nation of progress should
“—Stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart.”