The factory

by Jonathan Thayer Lincoln

Before considering the condition of the laboring population after the establishment of factories for weaving as well as for spinning, we should glance backward into the previous history of the laboring poor. During the prevalence of the feudal system the population of England was purely agricultural. The chief landed proprietors possessed a certain number of slaves who were employed generally in domestic service, but who also manufactured the wearing apparel and household furniture. “Priests are set apart for prayer,” says an ancient chronicle, “but it is fit that noble chevaliers should enjoy all ease, and taste all pleasures, while the laborer toils, in order that they may be nourished in abundance—they, and their horse, and their dogs.” This class of laborers, however, was never very large.

The great body of the peasantry was composed, first, of persons who rented small farms, and who paid their rent either in kind or in agricultural labor; and secondly, of cottagers, each of whom had a small parcel of land attached to his dwelling, and the privilege of turning out a cow, or pigs, or a few sheep into the woods, commons and wastes of the manor. During this whole period the entire population derived its subsistence immediately from the land. The mechanics of each village, not having time to cultivate a sufficient quantity of land to yield them a sustenance, received a fixed annual allowance of produce from each tenant. The peasantry worked hard and fared scantily enough, but still there was never an absolute want of food; the whole body was poor, but it contained no paupers.

During the fourteenth century the demand for wool not only to supply the markets of the Netherlands, but also the newly established manufacture of England, rapidly increased and the owners of the land found sheep-feeding more profitable than husbandry; and the sudden extension of manufacture in the fifteenth century greatly increased the demand. This circumstance led to an important change in the distribution of the population and the peasants previously employed in tillage were turned adrift upon the world. The allotments of arable land which had formerly afforded them the means of subsistence were converted into sheep walks and this policy greatly accelerated a social revolution which had already commenced. It eventually led to a complete severance between the English peasantry and the English soil; and with the exception of those employed in domestic manufacture, the little farmers and cottiers of the country were converted into day laborers depending entirely upon wages for their subsistence.

Thus when we come to consider the pitiable condition of the working classes, following the establishment of the factory, we must remember this underlying cause of the poverty and suffering, holding in mind the fact that from the beginning the increase of English poor rates kept pace visibly with the progress of the enclosure of the common land. Complaints against vagrancy and idleness, and the difficulty of providing for the poor increased proportionately with the progress of the system of consolidating farms, and abstracting from the English cottager his crofts and rights to the common lands. Upon the factory has fallen the blame for social conditions which had their source in causes long antedating its establishment—but the factory has sufficient misery for which to answer.

Arkwright’s inventions, as we have seen, took manufactures out of the cottages and farm houses of England and assembled them in factories. Thousands of hands were suddenly required especially in Lancashire, which until then was comparatively thinly populated. A great migration of population from the rural districts to the manufacturing towns was set in motion, thousands of families leaving the quiet life of the country for the intenser life of the city, but still the new demand for labor was unsatisfied. The custom sprang up of procuring apprentices from the parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere; and many thousand children between the ages of seven and fourteen years were thus sent to swell the numbers of the laboring population. Beside the factories stood apprentice houses in which the children were lodged and fed; and it was also the custom for the master manufacturer to furnish the apprentice with clothes.

The work required of the children was exacting. The pay of the overseers was fixed in proportion to the work produced, a circumstance which bore hard on the apprentices. The greatest cruelties were practiced to spur the children to excessive labor; they were flogged, fettered, and in many cases they were starved and some were driven to commit suicide. We have it on the authority of Mr. John Fielding, himself, a master manufacturer and member of Parliament for Oldham, that the happiest moments in the lives of many of these children were those passed in the workhouse.

The profits of manufacturing were enormous and so was the greed of the newborn manufacturing aristocracy. Night work was begun, the day shift going to sleep in the same beds that the night shift had just quitted, so that it was a common saying in Lancashire that the beds never got cold. Although the master manufacturers were unmoved by the dictates of humanity, they were not proof against the malignant fevers which broke out in the congested districts and spread their ravages throughout the manufacturing towns.

Public opinion was soon aroused which led to the institution in Manchester of a board of health which in the year 1796 made an interesting report. It appeared that the children and others working in the cotton factories were peculiarly disposed to the contagion of fever; and that large factories were generally injurious to those employed in them even when no particular disease prevailed, not only on account of the close confinement and the debilitating effect of the hot and impure air, but on account of the untimely labor of the night and the protracted hours of the working day.

These conditions with respect to the children not only tended to diminish the sum of life by destroying the health and thus affecting the vital stamina of the rising generation; but it also encouraged idleness and profligacy in the parents, who, in many instances, lived upon the labor of their children. It further appeared that the children employed in factories were debarred from all opportunities of education as well as from moral and religious instruction. The investigation produced this report and nothing more—“when the dangers of infection were removed the precautions of mercy were forgotten.”

Later, in the Parliamentary debate of 1815, Mr. Horner, one of the early factory reformers, graphically described the practices of the apprentice system. He told how, with a bankrupt’s effects, a gang of workhouse children were put up for sale and publicly advertised as a part of the property; how a number of boys apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another and in the process were left in a starving condition; how an agreement had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer by which it was stipulated that with every twenty sound children one idiot should be taken.