Early in the century—in the year 1801—the overcrowding of the factories and mills, the neglect of the simplest sanitary precautions, the long hours, the poor food, and insufficient rest, caused the outbreak of a dreadful epidemic fever, which alarmed even the mill-owners, because if they lost their hands they lost their machinery. The hands are the producers, and the aim of the masters was to regard the producers as so many machines. Now if your machine is laid low with fever it is as good as an engine out of repair.
For the first time in history, not only was the public conscience awakened, but the House of Commons was called upon to act in the interests of health, public morals, humanity, and justice. Strange, that the world had been Christian for so long, yet no law had been passed to protect women and children. In the Year of Grace 1802 a beginning was made.
By the Act then passed the daily hours of labour for children were to be not more than twelve—yet think of making young children work for twelve hours a day!—exclusive of an hour and a half for meals and rest, so that the working day really covered thirteen hours and a half, say from six in the morning until half-past seven in the evening. This seems a good day’s work to exact of children, but it was a little heaven compared with the state of things which preceded the Act. Next, no children were to be employed under the age of nine. Certain factories, proved to be unwholesome for children, were closed to them altogether. Twenty years later Sir John Cam Hobhouse—may his soul find peace!—invented the Saturday half-holiday for factories. There was found, however, a loophole for cruelty and overwork; the limitation of hours was evaded by making the hands work in relays, by which means a child might be kept at work half the night. It was, therefore, in 1833 enacted that there should be no work done at all between 8.30 P.M. and 5.30 A.M.: that children under thirteen should not work more than forty-eight hours a week, and those under eighteen should not work more than sixty-eight hours a week.
J. C. Hobhouse
-SIR JOHN C. HOBHOUSE-
Observe that nothing—not the light of publicity, not public opinion, not common humanity, not pity towards the tender children—nothing but Law had any power to stop this daily massacre of the innocents. Yet, no doubt, the manufacturers were subscribing for all kinds of good objects, and reviling the Yankees continually for the institution of Slavery.
What happened next? Greed of gain, seeing the factory closed, looked round, and saw wide open—not the gates of Hell—but the mouth of the Pit, and they flung the children down into the darkness, and made them work among the narrow passages and galleries of the coal mines.
They took the child—boy or girl—at six years of age; they carried the little thing away from the light of heaven, and lowered it deep down into the black and gloomy pit; they placed it behind a door, and ordered it to pull this open to let the corves, or trucks, come and go, and to keep it shut when they were not passing. The child was set at the door in the dark—at first they gave it a candle, which would burn for an hour or two and then go out. Think of taking a child of six—your child, Madam!—and putting it all alone down the dark mine! They kept the little creature there for twelve interminable hours. If the child cried, or went to sleep, or neglected to pull the door open, they beat that child. The work began at four in the morning, and it was not brought out of the pit until four, or perhaps later, in the evening, so that in the winter the children never saw daylight at all. The evidence given before the Royal Commission showed that the children, when they were brought up to the pit’s mouth, were heavy and stupefied, and cared for little when they had taken their supper but to go to bed. And yet the men who owned these collieries had children of their own! And they would have gone on to this very day starving the children of light and loading them with work, stunting their growth, and suffering them to grow up in ignorance all their days, but for Lord Shaftesbury. This is what is written of the children and their work by one who visited the mines:—
To ascertain the nature of the employment of these children, I went down a pit.... Descending a shaft, 600 feet deep, I went some distance along a subterranean road which, I was told, was three miles in length. To the right and left of one of these roads or ways are low galleries, called workings, in which the hewers are employed, in a state of almost perfect nudity, on account of the great heat, digging out the coal. To these galleries there are traps, or doors, which are kept shut, to guard against the ingress or egress of inflammable air, and to prevent counter-currents disturbing the ventilation. The use of a child, six years of age, is to open and shut one of these doors when the loaded corves, or coal trucks, pass and repass. For this object the child is trained to sit by itself in a dark gallery for the number of hours I have described. The older boys drive horses and load the corves, but the little children are always trap-keepers. When first taken down they have a candle given them, but, gradually getting accustomed to the gloom of the place, they have to do without, and sit therefore literally in the dark the whole time of their imprisonment.