The pamphlet begins with some calm wise words about the war, by which the reader is prepared to expect a very different treatment of the immediate topic in hand than that which it is destined to receive. No sooner is the subject touched than the false keynote is struck, and of all persons in the world, it is Miss Martineau whom we find echoing the exaggerated lamentations of an injured interest. “The issue,” we are told, “to which the controversy is now brought, is that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures, or the existing factory law. The two cannot longer co-exist.” This is one of those remarkable predictions of which we are beginning, by a very long national experience, to understand the value. If the cry be not ridiculous enough in the form just quoted, how does it look thus—for we have it repeated afterwards in this more piquant way,—“It seems to be agreed by the common sense of all concerned who have any common sense, that our manufactures must cease, or the factory law, as expounded by Mr. Horner must give way.” We believe it was Mr. Bounderby who was always going to throw his property into the Atlantic, and we have heard of Miss Martineau’s clients being indignant against Mr. Bounderby as a caricature. And yet this looks very like him!
The pamphlet then adopts the precise tone of the mill-owners in speaking of the accidents as chiefly “of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the act.” In the next place the yearly deaths by preventable accidents from machinery, which number about forty, are reduced to eleven, by excluding all machinery except the actual shafts, and throughout the pamphlet afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is used—once in a way that has astonished us, as it will certainly surprise our readers. Even lower down on the same page the writer slips into the statement, that there are only twelve deaths a-year by “mill-accidents from all kinds of factory machinery.” We wish it were so; but in the last report, published before we made our comments, there were twenty-one slain in six months; one hundred and fifty had, in six months, lost parts of their right hands; one hundred and thirty, parts of their left hands; twenty-eight lost arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had bones broken; a hundred had suffered fracture or serious damage to the head and face.
In the report for the half-year next following, the deaths by machinery in factories were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-one lost the right hand, or, more generally, parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and twenty had bones broken. Thirty-nine, therefore, was the number of deaths in the year last reported (a fresh half-yearly report is at present due), and there was no lack of accidents more serious than the “rubbing off a bit of skin.” Of the factory accidents, we are also told, not five per cent. are owing to machinery. If so, great indeed must be the number of the whole! But it is solely of the accidents arising from machinery that we from the first have spoken, since upon them only the law is founded which we wish to see maintained.
So far as we can understand the figures of the pamphlet, they arise from the ingenuity of some friend, who has eliminated from the rest those accidents arising out of actual contact with a shaft, and then put this part for the whole. But the law says, “That every fly-wheel directly connected with the steam-engine or water-wheel, or other mechanical power, whether in the engine-house or not, and every part of a steam-engine and water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near to which children or young persons are liable to pass or be employed, and all parts of the mill-gearing in a factory shall be securely fenced.” The whole controversy is about obedience to this law, and the consequences of resistance to it. The most horrible and fatal accidents are those connected most immediately with the shafts; the unfenced shafts are the essential type of the whole question, and the fencing of them implies necessarily the general consent to obey the law. For this reason we have, no doubt, in common with other people, frequently represented by such a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of resistance to the law, without any suspicion of the ingenious turn that might be given to the question on this ground, by an Association not ashamed to employ sleight of hand in argument.
And now that we discuss the figures of the pamphlet, we turn to another of the strange pages, headed Mis-statements in Household Words. We make, it is said, the extraordinary statement, that these deadly shafts “mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures; and considering,” the writer adds, “the magnitude of this exaggeration (our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers produce facts in answer to romance,” we proceed, it is said, “to beg the question as usual; in this passage: ‘As for ourselves, we admit freely, that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised or savage.’”
By that admission we abide—and by our figures we abide. This specimen of our mis-statements, of our “begging the question as usual,” is a yet more curious example of a question begged by the accusers, than that other proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not having read a document several weeks before it came into existence. We said, in the passage above cited, that the deadly shafts “mangled or murdered” so many persons a-year; that by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of the law, two thousand persons were mutilated or killed. The writer of the pamphlet has been led to beg wholly the addition of the mutilated on our side, and to set against it, on her side, only the killed, and not all those: only a selection from them of the persons actually killed on shafts; advantage being taken of the use of the phrase, deadly shafts, to represent machinery in unfenced mills. And that it is really meant, in the writer’s own phrase to “ignore” the fact that we counted the killed, is evident from a succeeding sentence. “If Mr. Dickens, or his contributor, assigns his number of two thousand a-year, his opponents may surely cite theirs—of three-and-a-half per cent. or twelve in a-year.” Our number, certainly, was wrong; but it erred only by under-statement. We might have said nearly four thousand, without falsehood. The number of deaths and mutilations together arising from machinery in factories, has been two thousand, not in a year, but half a year. Because we did not wish to urge the slight cuts, and the few scarcely avoidable mishaps which did not belong fairly to the case as we were stating it, we struck off some two thousand from the number that we might have given.
Our readers may now form some estimate of the strange weakness and unreasonableness of the pamphlet, issued by the Factory Association to refute us. There is not one strong point in it that affects the question; there is only one that seems strong, and to that the writer had in her own hands a most conclusive answer. Mr. Fairbairn, in December 1853, reported against the practicability or safety of fencing horizontal shafts. The answer to this is repeatedly contained in the Inspector’s reports for the half-year ending on the thirtieth of April last, cited at the head of Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. Their joint report states, “that a considerable amount of horizontal shafting under seven feet from the floor has been securely cased over in various parts of the country, and that strap-hooks and other contrivances for the prevention of accidents from horizontal shafts above seven feet from the floor, have been and are now being extensively employed in all our districts, excepting in that of Lancashire, and in places mainly influenced by that example.” And Mr. Howell is to be found reporting that in the west of England much new fencing had been done, and that the experiment had “been tried on a sufficiently large scale, and for a sufficiently long period to prove the fallacy of the apprehensions that were expressed, as to the practicability and success of fencing securely horizontal shafts. It has proved also that the doing so is unaccompanied by danger.” He gives illustration of this from the west of England, adding, however, that “in many instances, and more especially in the cotton factories in that part of my district which is situate in Cheshire and on the borders of Lancashire, little or nothing has yet been done, with some few conspicuous and honourable exceptions, to satisfy the requirements of the law in this respect.”
The pamphlet adds the Manchester cry of Fire! and quotes the agent of a fire-office, who gave it as his opinion, that if mills had boxed machinery they ought to pay increased insurance, because “away they would go without any possibility of salvation.” The agent of a fire-office, as we all know, may be the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker, sage or not sage; and to judge by his language in this particular case, not sage. Now, however, when a very large number of mills out of Lancashire are habitually working fenced machinery, will the National Association be so candid as to tell us—not what some local agent has said, but what the fire-offices do?
Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger—would pull all about the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question, the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in Yorkshire and other parts of my district—I mean the strap-hook, for preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very large number of factories, more or less in the different departments of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents, and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to cause accidents.”
Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die, die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it, “climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman, perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.