A cruel, unjustifiable war had devoured the laborer who should have been at his task. The laws had dragged him into the army and into the navy whether he wished to go or not. Press-gangs had prowled about the lanes and alleys clutching at every poor man who happened to be sound of limb, and had carried him off by force into a battleship, where he might be kept until the bride whom he had left at the church door had counted him as dead, or until the family which he had left contented and happy had been lost to the knowledge of men.
Having taken the father, the same remorseless class-greed demanded the child, and took it.
Upon the altar of English lust for money has been sacrificed more helpless men, women and children than ever fell before the ruthless hordes of Tamerlane or Attila.
“Within carefully guarded limits, child-labor is no more to be objected to in manufactures than in agriculture, but in the early days of the factory system these limits were utterly discarded.
“In the infancy of the system it became the custom of the master manufacturers to contract with the managers of workhouses throughout England and of the charities of Scotland, to send their young children to the factories of the great towns. Many thousands of children between the ages of six and ten were thus sent, absolutely uncared for and unprotected, and left to the complete disposal of masters who often had not a single thought except speedily to amass a fortune, and who knew that if the first supply of infant labor were used up there was still much more to be obtained.
“Thousands of children at this early age might be found working in the factories of England and Scotland, usually from twelve to fourteen, sometimes even fifteen and sixteen hours a day, not unfrequently during the greater part of the night. Destitute or drunken or unnatural parents made it a regular system to raise money by hiring out their children from six, sometimes from five, years old, by written contracts and for long periods. In one case brought before Parliament a gang of these children was put up for sale among a bankrupt’s effects, and publicly advertised as part of the property. In another an agreement was disclosed between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer in which it was stipulated that with every twenty sound children one idiot should be taken.”
“Even as late as 1840, when the most important manufactures had been regulated by law, Lord Ashley was able to show that boys employed in the carpet manufacture at Kidderminster were called up at three and four in the morning, and kept working sixteen or eighteen hours: that children five years old were engaged in the unhealthy trade of pin-making, and were kept at work from six in the morning to eight at night.” (Lecky, “England in Eighteenth Century.”)
In the coal mines and in the salt mines men, women and children were literally beasts of burden—were chattels, and when the mines were sold the human machines passed from one owner to another just as the mechanical apparatus passed.
There were women who in these coal mines, where the tunnels were too narrow to allow them to stand upright, had to crawl back and forward on their hands and knees for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, drawing after them the trucks loaded with coal.