The regulations comprised in the Employment of Children Act are in part of general application, in part dependent on by-laws made by the local authority, and approved by the Home Secretary. The local authority, for the enforcement of the Act and for the making of by-laws, is, in the case of London, exclusive of the City, for which the Common Council is the authority, the London County Council; in the case of a municipal borough with a population according to the census of 1901 of over 10,000, the Borough Council; in the case of any other urban district with a population of over 20,000, the District Council; in the case of the remainder of England and Wales, the County Council.[42]
These are the chief Acts through which are regulated the conditions of boy labour. Each in a more or less degree is concerned with prohibition, limitation of hours, and health regulations. It now remains to examine the extent of the protection provided.
(a) Prohibition of Employment.
There is no law forbidding children below a certain age to work for wages. In default of local by-laws, it is still legal to employ children of any age, however young, in a large number of occupations. Prohibition takes the form of forbidding the employment of children in certain trades regarded as specially dangerous to health or demoralizing to character.
1. It is illegal to employ children or young persons “in the part of a factory or workshop in which there is carried on the process of silvering mirrors by the mercurial process or the process of making white lead.”[43] And the Secretary of State has power to extend this prohibition to other dangerous trades.[44]
2. It is illegal to employ underground in any mine boys under the age of thirteen,[45] and no boy under the age of twelve may be employed above-ground in connection with any mine.[46]
3. A child may not be employed “in the part of a factory or workshop in which there is carried on any grinding in the metal trade, or the dipping of lucifer-matches.”[47]
4. A child under the age of eleven may not be employed in street-trading—i.e., in “the hawking of newspapers, matches, flowers, and other articles, playing, singing, or performing for profit, shoe-blacking, or any like occupation carried on in streets or public places.”[48]
5. In theatres and shows, children under seven may not be employed at all, and children under eleven can only be employed on a licence granted by a magistrate.[49]
Omitting ways of earning money, as by begging, which cannot properly be regarded as forms of employment, and ancient Acts, such as the Chimney Sweepers Act of 1840, which prohibited the apprenticing of children under the age of sixteen to the trade of the sweep, or the Agricultural Gangs Act, 1867, which forbade the employment of children under eight in an agricultural gang—Acts which have now little practical importance—the regulations outlined above comprise the whole of the regulations which prohibit throughout the country the employment of boys in certain forms of occupation. For any extension of prohibition we must look to the by-laws which may, but need not, be made by local authorities under the provisions of the Employment of Children Act.