After the repeal of the Statute of Apprentices there was for the lad no sort of legal guarantee of training, no kind of State supervision over his conduct; he could work how and when it pleased him or his parents. But the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 made it necessary for him to work how and when it pleased his employer, and took from him all possibility of effective choice. This Act abolished the allowance system in aid of wages. Salutary and even necessary as some reform of the kind was, in the particular way in which it was carried out it fell with crushing force on the unfortunate children. Hitherto parents could receive so much per child out of the rates; from henceforth this was to be illegal. Wages indeed rose, but rose slowly and in patches. The earnings of the child were required to make existence even possible for the family. A foreign and impartial student of English affairs has made this truth abundantly clear: “Even granted that the labourer himself now needed no allowance, what had he in place of the allowance for his family and the out-of-work relief? Something in place of these he must have, for even labourers’ families must live.... What was the way out? The labourer must sell more labour power; and since his own was already sold, he must put that of his family upon the market. This was how the problem of the married man was solved.... We have already seen that the expansion of the gang system took place mainly after 1834; it appears that the exploitation of child-labour and women’s labour is the main characteristic of the period between the Poor Law and the Education Acts. When Dr. Kay was examined before the Lords’ Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act, he described the astonishment of travellers at the number of women and children working in the fields, and traced their increased employment to the Poor Law. In his own words: ‘The extent of employment for women and children has most wonderfully increased since the Poor Law came into operation. It has had that effect by rendering it necessary that the children should be so employed in order to adjust the wages to the wants of the family....’ And a country clergyman gave expression to similar views in 1843: ‘By these allowances their children were not then obliged, as now, to work for their subsistence. Their time was at their own disposal; and then they were sent more regularly to the schools. But since the new Poor Law this has been reversed.’”[31]
Those persons who nowadays talk genially of the ease with which the new Poor Law was enforced, would do well to remember that the ease was purchased at the high price of the physical and moral deterioration of the children. Chalmers had got his way, there was now free competition among the workmen; and free competition among the workmen meant then, as it has always meant since, the unregulated slavery of the weak.
With the repeal of the Statute of Apprentices and the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act, the old apprenticeship system came to an end. No longer capable of being controlled in the common interests of the trade and the community, no longer capable of being enforced by statutory enactment, the apprenticeship system in its ancient form, though it might linger among certain industries, was destined slowly to disappear. We may regret its disappearance, as the vanishing of a fragment of an old-world life; but repinings are idle unless directed toward the search for some substitute adequate to the needs of the present.
CHAPTER III
THE AGE OF RECONSTRUCTION
The last chapter closed on the darkest scene in the long history of child labour in this country. Of the three factors essential to a true apprenticeship, not one was found or its need even recognized in the wild riot of the industrial revolution. Of public or organized supervision of the youth of the land there was not a trace. The controlling influence of the gild system had long since disappeared; the powers of regulation that lay in the Statute of Apprentices and the Elizabethan Poor Law had been withdrawn; free and unrestricted traffic in the use of children was the watchword of the age. Babies of four and five years worked alongside the adult and for the same number of hours; there were persons of intelligence who saw in this gain extracted from infants not the least of the triumphs of the day. Children’s lives were often a mere alternation of two kinds of darkness—the darkness of night giving place to the darkness of the mine. Boys and girls were hired out in troops to a taskmaster, herded in barns regardless of the claims of health and decency, and driven in gangs into the fields of the farmer. Whether in the mine or the factory or on the farm, the present profits of the employer, and not the future welfare of the race, were alone considered. Industrial training throughout the new manufacturing districts was treated with open contempt. A person, the masters urged, could learn the trade in a few months; while as for the provision of an opening that would lead from the work of the youth to the work of the adult, it was not to be imagined that a subject of this complexity should receive attention at a time when the narrow circuit of the prosperous factory set a limit to the horizon of men’s thoughts. In short, over the whole field of industry the desire for immediate success dominated the larger, but more remote, interests of the future.
What was most significant of the times was not the flood of misery that swept over the country so much as the spirit of complacent satisfaction with which it was regarded. That the industrial revolution was in the cause of progress, the reform of the Poor Law essential, and the decay of the old apprenticeship system inevitable, men of intelligence could not fail to recognize; but they might also have recognized that the profound transformation of the whole social and industrial structure involved could not take place without widespread suffering and demoralization. Men of the day did see these things, but saw them with unconcern. Progress involved change, and change demanded its toll of pain; but it was not the duty of the State to ease the passage or to yield to the outcry of what they looked on as the silly sentimentalist.
The general view of contemporary opinion finds itself reflected in the Whig and Radical journals. In 1819 the Edinburgh Review declared: “After all, we must own that it was quite right to throw out the Bill for prohibiting the sweeping of chimneys by boys—because humanity is a modern invention; and there are many chimneys in old houses that cannot possibly be swept in any other manner;” while the Radical paper, the Gorgon, was also inclined to sneer at the House of Commons for “its ostentatious display of humanity in dealing with trivialities like the slave trade, climbing-boys, and the condition of children in factories.”[32] The above represents the orthodox opinion of the time. The age was the age of the triumph of the individualist. His was the gospel that inspired the economist; his were the maxims which guided the legislator; his were the principles that were realized in the practice of the manufacturer. For one brief moment in the history of the world’s progress the individualist was supreme; and then the world reeled back in horror from the hell of sin and misery he had created. Even in the early days there were not wanting voices to protest against the theory that in the balance-sheet of the trader was to be found the final test of national righteousness. As far back as the year 1801 Mr. Justice Grose, in sentencing an employer for overworking and maltreating an apprentice, declared: “Should the manufacturers insist that without these children they could not advantageously follow their trade, and the overseers say that without such opportunity they could not get rid of these children, he should say to the one, that trade must not for the thirst of lucre be followed, but at once, for the sake of society, be abandoned; and to the other, it is a crime to put out these children, who have no friend to see justice done, to incur deformity and promote consumption or other disease. This obviously leads to their destruction—not to their support.”[33] And in the year 1802 was passed the “Health and Morals of Apprentices Act,” an Act important not for its results, which were insignificant, but as a protest against the gospel of individualism, and as the first of the long series of Factory Acts which heralded the dawn of a new age.