The eighteenth century was nearly a blank period in the history of direct regulation of industrial conditions by the State. There was no systematic intervention on the scale of Tudor or Victorian times; and political opinion hardened against the principle and destroyed the machinery which had been inherited from the sixteenth century. Such machinery, for the regulation of wages, was still occasionally used in the early part of the eighteenth century, as is shown by occasional examples of wages assessments at Quarter Sessions (No. 2). Acts were passed for individual trades forbidding the practice of paying wages in truck (No. 1). Local pressure even obtained a special Act providing for the regulation of London silk-weavers' wages (No. 3, No. 4). This Spitalfields Act was used as a precedent for the proposals to extend the policy of regulation, which began to fill the Journals of the House of Commons during the period when the new machinery and methods and the French wars dislocated employment and wages. Examples are given of petitions asking that wages should be regulated and that the limitation of apprentices should be enforced under the statute 5 Elizabeth c. 4, to which attention had been called (Nos. 10, 11, 12 and 14). Independent attempts were made to set up a minimum wage, directly and through wages-boards (Nos. 5, 6 and 19). All these applications ended in complete failure. Parliament provided a system of arbitration for the cotton industry (Nos. 7 and 8), but repealed both the wages and apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan Act. Contemporary opinion in Parliament relied on the working of free bargaining and economic forces (Debates on Whitbread's Bill and on Apprenticeship, Nos. 6 and 13).
The history of Factory legislation (Nos. 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22) shows how the policy of non-interference was abandoned in another field. The employment of children in the new factories was one result of the eighteenth century system of Poor relief. It produced horrors which the first Factory Act was designed to remedy (No. 9). But the use of steam-power and the growth of big industrial districts led to the wholesale employment of children not under the Poor Law. Public opinion was at last aroused by the campaigns of Oastler and others, who pointed to the contrast between the Anti-Slavery agitation and the conditions of the English mills (No. 17). The successive Acts of 1819, 1833, 1842 and 1844 (Nos. 16, 18, 20, 22) show how legislators were forced to extend the principle of regulation from children to young persons and women, and from cotton mills to other textile factories and to mines. In the debate on the Act of 1844 the respective points of view of the Tory philanthropist, the political economist, and the manufacturer, were dramatically contrasted (No. 21). The last extract is from one of a series of reports on the condition of great industrial towns (No. 23), by which Chadwick, a disciple of Bentham and a champion of the new Poor-law, forced Parliament to interfere in the economic control of town life.
AUTHORITIES
For modern writers on general conditions, see Authorities for Section I. The history of agitation for Factory legislation is to be found in Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation; Von Plener Die Englische Fabrikgesetzgebung; Alfred (S. Kydd), The Factory Movement; Cooke Taylor, The Factory System and the Factory Acts; Keeling, Child Labour in the United Kingdom, Part I. Details of the agitation are given in Hodder, Life of Shaftesbury; Podmore, Life of Owen; Hutchins, The Public Health Agitation; Greenwood, Richard Oastler. A general view is given in Dicey, Law and Opinion in England; Kirkman Gray, Philanthropy and the State; Held, Zwei Bücher zur Sozialen Geschichte Englands.
Bibliographies are in Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit.; Cunningham, op. cit.; and Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XII.
Contemporary.—See Authorities for Section I. In addition, for Wages Assessments under the Spitalfields Act in 1784 and 1795, see collection in British Museum, 1029, p. 4. The Reports of Factory Inspectors are valuable sources after 1833. See also Hansard Parliamentary Debates on Wages, and Factory Legislation, 1795, 1813-14, 1816, 1832-3, 1844, 1846.
The chief contemporary literary sources for general conditions are given under Section I. The Factory legislation movement is described by some of the actors: Owen, Observations on the Manufacturing System; Oastler, Yorkshire Slavery, Life and Opinions, Letters from the Fleet, etc.; Memoir of the Life and Writings of Michael Sadler; Nassau Senior, Letters on the Factory Act; L. Horner, On the Employment of Children in Factories.
1. An Act Against Truck [Statutes, 1 Anne 2, 18], 1701.
An act for the more effectual preventing the abuses and frauds of persons imployed in the working up the woollen, linen, fustian, cotton, and iron manufactures of this kingdom.