The Child in Human Progress

The house of Santa Maria in Sassia to which Guy was called was attached to the church of that name which had been founded by Gna, king of the later Saxons, in 715. It had undergone many disastrous changes, but in 1198 Innocent III., at his own expense, had it renovated and repaired for the sick and poor of Rome. In 1204, moved by the frequency with which the fishermen of the Tiber found in their nets the bodies of children that had been thrown into the river, the Pope dedicated part of the hospital to the care of abandoned children, and it was to this institution that Guy of Montpellier was called.

The humane movement spread rapidly, generally under at least the nominal guidance of the Order of Saint Esprit. Many institutions, however, were founded in the name of Saint Esprit where little attention was paid to children.

The institution at Embeck422 founded in 1274 made a special work of taking care of abandoned children in the name of Saint Esprit. We come now to the name of Enrad Fleinz,423 that bourgeois of Nuremberg, who in 1331 founded in his natal town the first hospital where not only children might be left, but where women might go to be delivered, without regard to whether the offspring were legitimate or not. This, too, was in the name of Saint Esprit, and in the year 1362, a similar asylum for orphans was founded in Paris.

It was indeed under the auspices of this order that the movement which began with the imperial Brephotrophia in the sixth century grew, until the various institutions of one sort or another intended to prevent the outright murder of children or their abandonment in deserted places were dependent, not on the humanity of any one man or group of men, but on the new-born spirit that was then spreading throughout Europe and that continued to spread even when individualism and materialism as ruling forces had supplanted religion and asceticism. The history of charity, which, as Lecky says, is yet to be written, will doubtless reveal, when it comes to be written, the various unappreciated factors that went to produce the humane movement.

Some idea of how rapidly these institutions had multiplied may be obtained from a bull of Nicholas IV., containing a long enumeration of the various foundations, which includes places in Italy, Sicily, Germany, England, France, and Spain.424

Besides those enumerated by the Pope, there were however other institutions springing up where, either as an adjunct to hospital work or as an independent work itself, children were being cared for. As one of the original and most scholarly writers on this phase of the subject has pointed out, it is difficult to make positive statements about these foundations, for the men interested were intent on their work rather than on leaving a record of it behind. Perhaps in this connection, some future historian, in viewing the voluminous charitable records of our day, will assume that “social” egotism has been well saddled, and made to do more than the work of a timely charitable impulse.

The conditions that led to the crusade of Vincent of Paul antedated that philanthropist by several hundred years. Where the religious spirit had failed to arouse interest in the problem of the welfare of parentless children, the large cities of Europe were themselves forced to take some action. Milan, in 1168, on the prayer of the Cardinal Galdinus, founded a hospital (which would indicate that the institution founded by Datheus had either fallen into disuse or was inadequate) and Venice in 1380 followed the example of Milan, while the magnificent hospital for foundling children in Florence (Spidale degl’ Innocenti) was founded, after a long deliberation in open council, on October 25, 1421.

Included in these governmental or municipal movements is that of St. Thomas of Villeneuve, Archbishop of Valence, who created an asylum in his own palace at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and gave orders that no children presented there should be turned away.

The Hotel-Dieu de Notre Dame de Pitié of Lyons, which by letters patent of 1720 was declared to be the oldest hospital of France, commenced in 1523 the same work, and in that year is recorded as having received nine children. On February 25, 1530, François the First recognized the right of the institution to take in these children.

In 1596 the city of Amsterdam began to make provision for the abandoned children.

The beginning of the movement in Paris, we learn, was the result of the terrible conditions that followed the war in 1360, 1361, and 1362.425 Poverty and misery were everywhere, and a large number of orphans practically lived and died in the streets, says Breuil in his Antiquités de Paris. Various charitable people took in some of these unfortunates, the Hotel-Dieu being overrun; but, as the conditions were but little ameliorated, on February 7, 1362, a group of citizens went to the “Reverend father in God, Messire Jean de Meulant, 88th Bishop of Paris,” and discussed with him the frightful conditions of the poor boys and girls of Paris. The evils attending the homeless condition of the latter were especially considered. We are told that the result of the conference was that the Bishop gave them permission to institute and erect a hospital of Saint Esprit and bestowed on each one of the conferees forty days’ indulgence.

The institution that arose as a result of this conference has been criticized as being narrow in its purpose, inasmuch as the rules declared that only legitimate children, born of parents in Paris, were to be admitted; but the restriction, it must be understood, was necessary, in view of the small funds in hand.

But humanitarian feeling was growing; and people were beginning to be proud of being thoughtful and kind. It was no longer a mark of superiority to be lustful of blood. Botterays, in a Latin poem on Paris,426 spoke of the splendid way in which the orphan children of Paris were brought up, referring to the Hospital of Saint Esprit and the House of the Enfants-Dieu. After long years of nominal acquiescence in its teachings, the barbarians of the North were really beginning to accept the Christianity of Christ.

CHAPTER XXI

CRUELTY TO CHILDREN IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY—ATTEMPT AT REGULATION—DEFORMING CHILDREN FOR MOUNTEBANK PURPOSES—ANECDOTE OF VINCENT DE PAUL—HIS WORK AND HIS SUCCESS.

FROM Datheus to Vincent de Paul the general history of the child in Europe moves as from one mountain peak to another with a long valley of gloom in between. Datheus has received no credit; Vincent de Paul has been justly recognized as a deserving contemporary of that list of brilliant men who went to make up the Golden Age of France. Golden Age that it was, with its highly polished manners, there, under the reign of the elegant Mazarin and the delicate Anne of Austria, it was no uncommon sight to see a child lying dead on the pavements, while others died of misery and hunger under the very eyes of the passers-by. Not a day passed, say the chroniclers, when the men who had charge of the sewers or the police did not draw out at least the body of one child.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Europe, and France especially, was war-ridden. During the sixteenth century, the religious and charitable impulses had suffered, first through the national war, then by the factional wars, and finally by religious wars.

“The religious war,” said the historian of Languedoc,427 “almost entirely destroyed the Hospital of Montpellier ... and even the order of Saint Esprit was dying out throughout France.”

It was a curious and disjointed society, that of the France of that day. Kingdoms there were within the royal domain; the laws of the large city frequently clashing with those of the province within which it was located; here and there provinces following their own laws rather than the laws of the kingdom itself. In some provinces the Church dominated; in others the nobles; elsewhere, the two classes were beginning to melt into the body of the nation which occasionally overrode both.428

At Aix, for instance, it was the custom to place the abandoned child in a religious home where, as in the rest of Provence, the unknown bastard was charged to the nearest hospital. Practically the same law was observed in Bretagne.

At Poitiers, a decree on September 15, 1579, “condemning the provision by which religious orders nourished infants found at their door,” ordered that the monasteries and ecclesiastic chapters of the place should be called on to regulate their contributions to the support of the children.

But as a rule the great nobles were obliged to take care of the foundlings abandoned within their jurisdiction. In the origin of the fiefs, the bastards had been set down as épaves (waifs), and the interpreters of the law (jurisconsults) had decided that the lord had no right to refuse to take care of the épaves. The parliaments too took the view that, inasmuch as the seigneur profited by all deaths that occurred and succeeded to all titles in the case of disinheritance within his domain, he should accept the liability for the care of the unknown children found within their domain.

Of the many decrees which touch on this important point, the oldest is that of the Parliament of Paris in the year 1547. Many other arrêts followed, until on September 3, 1667, the following, in the interest of the special hospitals, declared that:

“All the seigneurs (hauts justiciers) will be held responsible for the expense and nourishment of all infants whose parents are unknown, and who are found exposed on their lands and taken to hospitals.”

This regulation, as Ramcle says, failed in its purpose, for it was not possible to force what was considered charity on the none too generous nobles. The laws were evaded, and each community tried to send to its neighbours the unfortunate infants it should have guarded.

The mortality of infants increased, and as in Rome in the days of the Empire, mothers threw their children into the sewers or left them on the highways. Those less inhuman left them at the doors of the hospitals, where, during the winter, in the morning, they were frequently taken in more dead than alive.

Of course, the laws against these abandonments were promptly enforced—the unfortunate women were easily punished. A girl who killed her offspring was hung, and others who were caught leaving children in solitary places were whipped and disgraced in the cities and villages where they lived.

By an edict of Henry II., under penalty of punishment, a woman enceinte was obliged to declare her condition; and to add to this bungling legislative effort, she was obliged to tell who the guilty man was, the maxim creditur virgini being accepted everywhere. The attempts at curing the ills failed, for, while the intentions of the legislators were undoubtedly honest, they only exposed shameless conditions, made the unfortunate suffer even more, brought ruin to many honest families, and gain to shameless women only. The number of children abandoned and murdered in defiance of the regulations increased instead of decreasing.

At this time there came an individual effort to better things, by a woman whose name is not even known and whose efforts at a noble work have, owing to the actions of her servants, been much misinterpreted.

Living in a house in the Cité de Saint-Landry, Paris, with two servants, she received every morning the infants that the soldiers (or police) had collected during the night. So many were eventually turned over to her, that she was unable to feed them, and many died in her own house for lack of food. In the crowded conditions we are also told a selection429 was made and some of the children were exposed again, or at least they were turned over to some charitable or interested person who would accept them. The care of the children devolving finally on the two servants, many of them are said to have perished from the drugs they were given to keep them quiet. The availability of children as beggars led the servants to look on them as a means of money making, and they were sold for various cruel and evil purposes, a condition that eventually led to the reform undertaken by Vincent de Paul.

The fact that they frequently fell into the hands of magicians, mountebanks, and pedlars, who deformed them in order to make them of assistance in earning a livelihood, is attested by the biographer of Vincent.

“Returning from one of his missions,” says Maury, “Vincent de Paul, whom I have dared to call almost the visible angel of God, found under the walls of Paris one of these infants, in the hands of a beggar, who was engaged in deforming the limbs of the child. Although almost overcome with horror, he ran to the savage with that intrepidity with which the virtuous man always attacks crime.

“‘Barbarian,’ he cried, ‘how you deceive me—from a distance I took you for a man!’

“He snatched the victim from its persecutor, carried it in his arms across Paris, gathered a crowd about him and called on them to witness the brutality of the day and place in which they lived. A few days later he had founded his first institution for children, and the cause of children had enrolled one of its noblest champions.”

In order to thoroughly understand the situation, a number of charitable women under the guidance of Madame Legas, niece of the Lord Chancellor Marillac,430 went to the house in the Cité de Saint-Landry and studied the question from the inside of the house. Their horror at the things they saw led them to declare that the children massacred by Herod were fortunate in comparison with the condition of the orphans of Paris.431 As it was impossible to take charge of all the children then in the Cité de Saint-Landry twelve children were taken, and in 1638, under the care of Madame Legas and some charitable women, a house was opened for them in the Faubourg Saint-Victor. As they were able to enlarge the scope of their institution, more and more children were taken care of; the enthusiasm of these women ran so high under the glowing example of Vincent, that even in the dead of night in the cold corners, they would be found going about the streets of Paris, into the worst and least lighted sections, doing police duty, gathering the unfortunate victims, and carrying them to the house in the Faubourg Saint-Victor.432

In the course of time, sufficient interest had developed in this work so that enough money was forthcoming to enlarge the scope. Vincent gathered together the pious women who had acted as his assistants and addressed to them that touchante allocution, sometimes quoted as a model of eloquence.433 The house in the Faubourg Saint-Victor was soon found to be too small, and the Château de Bicêtre was obtained from the king.

The place was not found suitable on account of the vivacité de l’air and the children were transferred to the Faubourg Saint-Lazare, then in 1672 to the Cité, near Notre Dame, where they remained up to the Revolution. Then they were assigned the ancient abbaye of Port Royal and the maison de l’Oratoire, located in the southern part of Paris.

The success of the new undertaking was so great that even Louis XIII. became interested and donated four thousand francs per year to the charity. Inasmuch as in the long history of the child’s fight for a place in the government, this was the first recognition by a government since the Roman emperors, it is interesting to read Louis’s own statement in the preamble of the letters patent relating to this gift:

“Having been informed by persons of great piety, that the little attention which has been given up to the present to the nourishing and care of the parentless children exposed in the city and outskirts of Paris has been the cause of death, and even has it been known that they have been sold for evil purposes, and this having brought many ladies to take care of these children, who have worked with so much zeal and charitable affection that their zeal is spreading, and wishing so much to do what is possible under the present circumstances,434 we have,” etc.

The example of Louis was followed in 1641 by his widow, Anne of Austria, who made an annual gift of 8000 francs. She had become regent and, speaking in the name of the young King, said that “imitating the piety and the charity of the late King, which are truly royal virtues, he adds to this first gift, another annual gift of 8000 francs. Thanks to what has already been given and the charity of individuals, the greater number of the infants rescued have been raised, and there are now more than four hundred living.”

In June, 1670, Louis XIV. made the children’s hospital one of the institutions of Paris, and authorized it to discharge the functions and enjoy the privileges of such an institution.

“As there is no duty more natural,” he declared, “and none that conforms more to the idea of Christian charity than to care for the unfortunate children who are exposed—their feebleness and their misfortune making them doubly worthy of our compassion ... considering also that their protection and safeguarding is to our advantage inasmuch as some of them may become soldiers, others workmen, inhabitants of the colonies,” etc.435

The edict declared that while the expenses of the institution had reached forty thousand francs a year, the royal donation could not exceed twelve thousand francs, and the King exhorted the women of charity who had done so much, to continue their notable work.

This royal recognition of the great institution at Paris was not without evil effect in the provinces. The nobles and the civic authorities of rural communities, wishing to get rid of the burden of the infants deserted within their jurisdiction, had the unfortunates taken to Paris.436 They were usually carried there by men who were driving in on other business, and as many stops were made between the starting point and the destination, and as the drivers were more interested in other things than in the infant baggage, for which they were paid in advance, the mortality greatly increased.

“There was hardly a town in the kingdom,” said Latyone,437 “where abandoned children were admitted freely and without information being requested. In the towns that were not too far from Paris, they were carried thirty and forty leagues, at the risk of having them die on the way; and the hospital at Paris was overcrowded and in debt.”

This condition of affairs led to a new law, after a report which declared that of two thousand infants carried to Paris from the provinces, in all sorts of weather, by public vehicles without care or protection, three quarters had died within three months. The new law decreed that any wagoner bringing an infant to Paris to expose it would be fined one thousand livres. Inasmuch as the rule was made in the interest of the children, it was also decreed that abandoned children must be brought to the nearest hospital, and if that hospital declared that it had not enough funds to support the foundlings, the royal treasury might be drawn on.

CHAPTER XXII

RISE OF FACTORY SYSTEM—THE CHILD A CHARGE ON THE STATE—CHILDREN ACTUALLY SLAVES UNDER FACTORY SYSTEM—REFORM OF 1833—OASTLER AGAINST THE CHILD SLAVERY—“JUVENILE LABOUR IN FACTORIES IS A NATIONAL BLESSING”.

THE cannibalistic stage has passed and the day of sacrifice has passed—no longer is the child frankly a convenience nor is its life, as a result of past economic stress, a lightly considered trifle to be tossed into the cauldron of religious ceremony. Philosophy, humanity, civilization, and religion have combined to make the life of the child safe.

With what result?

The general belief that children were not regularly employed until the middle of the last century, when the factory system arose, had led to the equally erroneous belief that it was in the factory where the industrial abuse of children was first practised. In France where there was little industrial use for children in the large centres of population, where in other words children did not pay, the problem of modern humanity was to save infants from exposure and death. In England where there was an industrial use for them from early times, and where from the earliest times there are records of their abuse, there was no necessity for measures to protect them from infanticidal tendencies. But it is in England that we must study the ill-treatment of children that was brought about by the desire to make them useful.

The industrial records of the Middle Ages contain but few references438 to children, for the adults were busy with their own troubles. One of the first of these notices was an order issued by the famous Richard Whittington, in 1398, and, although it is mixed with other considerations, it shows the human spark. It reads:

“Ordinances of the Hurers.

“22 Richard II., A. D. 1398. Letter-Book H., fol. cccxviii. (Norman French).

“On the 20th day of August, in the 22d year, etc., the following Articles of the trade of Hurers were by Richard Whityngtone, Mayor, and the Aldermen, ordered to be entered.—

“In the first place,—that no one of the said trade shall scour a cappe or hure, or anything pertaining to scouryng, belonging to the said trade, in any open place: but they must do this in their own houses; seeing that some persons in the said trade have of late sent their apprentices and journeymen as well as children of tender age and others, down to the water of Thames and other exposed places, and amid horrible tempests, frosts, and snows, to the very great scandal, as well of the good folks of the said trade, as of the City aforesaid. And also, because of that divers persons, and pages belonging to lords, when they take their horses down to the Thames, are often-times wrangling with their said apprentices and journeymen; and they are then on the point of killing one another, to the very great peril that seems likely to ensue therefrom.”439

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the peasants were the villeins of the owners of the land and held their small farms in return for the work done, the work of children was contracted for, “the lord very frequently demanding the labour of the whole family, with the exception of the housewife.”440

Nearly all the trades and manufactures in the Middle Ages were under the control of the guilds, so that almost all of the children working, excepting those on farms or in domestic service, came under their supervision. The attitude of the guilds toward child labour is shown in the regulations of the apprenticeships, but this interest was mainly industrial, for in regulating the work of the children they protected their members from cheap labour and at the same time, by their supervision over the work of the rising generation, saw that the guild’s reputation for the proper kind of labour was kept up and prices therefore held to a desirable level.441

At the same time there was a religious side to the guilds, a strong religious side, and while everything they did, such as the prohibition of night work (not out of consideration of the health of the workers but because it might lead to bad work),442 had a purely industrial aspect, there is no doubt that this social and religious side developed in the guilds and their members an outlook on the broader and more humane aspects of their own place in society. The custom of not permitting a man to employ other than his own wedded wife and his own daughter was not humanitarian in its intention but its effect could not be other than beneficial.

“No one of the said trade,” said the ordinances of the Braelers (makers of braces) in 1355, “shall be so daring as to work at his trade at night ... also, that no one of the said trade shall be so daring as to set any woman to work in his trade, other than his wedded wife, or his daughter.”443

In 1562 the Statute of Artificers was passed, regulating the system of apprenticeship which had hitherto been a matter of regulation only among the guilds themselves. The national sanction thereby given to the apprentice system meant much and had a great influence in the years to come. The chief features of the Act, binding by indenture, registration of the agreement, and a minimum term of seven years on the indoor system, led to the master’s entire control of the boy and up to 1814 affected the relationships of the child employed or otherwise under the control of an employer.

Coincident with the development of the interest in the child as an industrial factor arose the interest in the child as a charge on the State, a phase of the child question that in the ancient civilizations had found its answer mainly in the toleration of infanticide. The Common Council of London on September 27, 1556, passed an Act, the following extract from which will go to show that there was then an attempt to go back of the child problem and an endeavour to regulate marriage.

“Forasmuche as great pouertie, penurye and lacke of lyvynge hathe of late yeres by dyverse and soundrye occasyons wayes and meanes arysen growen and encreased within this Cytye of London not onelye amongste the pore artyficers and handye craftes men of the same Cytie but also amongest other Cytezens of suche Companyes as in tymes paste have lyved and prosperouslye and in greate wealthe and one of the Chiefeste occasyons thereof (as it is thought and semeth to all men who by longe tyme have knowne the same Cytie and have had experyence of the state thereof) is by reason of the ouer hastie mariages and ouer soone setting vpp of howsholdes of and by the youthe and yonge folkes of the saide Cytye whiche have commenlye vsyd and yet do to marye themselues as soone as euer they comme out of their Apprentycehood be they neuer so yonge and unskyllfull....”444

In the time of Henry VIII. an attempt was made to take care of the question of the growing number of vagrant children by making all vagrant children between the years of five and fourteen liable to be bound out to some master as apprentices, the boys until they were twenty-four and the girls until they were twenty.445

In 1601 a statute was passed which gave to justices of the peace the power of apprenticing not only the children of paupers and vagrants but the children of those parents who were overburdened with children and who were unable to support them.

“And be it further enacted that it shalbe lawfull for the saide churchwardens and overseers, or the greater parte of them, by the assent of any two justices of the peace aforesaid, to binde any suche children as aforesaide to be apprentices, where they shall see convenient, till suche man child shall come to the age of fower and twentie yeares, and such woman child to the age of one and twenty yeares, or the tyme of her mariage; the same to be as effectuall to all purposes as if suche childe were of full age, and by indenture of covenant bounde hym or her selfe.”446

In the seventeenth century, the practice of putting children prematurely to work prevailed to an extent which, when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, “seems almost incredible,” says Macaulay.447

A little creature of six years old was thought fit for labour in the town of Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade. Writers at that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently benevolent,448 mention, “with exultation, the fact that in that single city boys and girls of tender age created wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a year.”

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century was sudden and violent. All the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright, and Boulton were made within twenty years, steam was applied to the new looms, and the modern factory system had fairly begun.449 With the demand for labourers and the fact that the division of labour brought about a call for low-priced workmen, some of the divisions really necessitating no greater intelligence than that of a child, the children were in great demand.

It was here that the Statute of Artificers assisted in the crushing industrial conditions, for the overseers of the poor became the agents of the mill-owners and arranged for days when the pauper children could be inspected and selected for the factory work. When the selections had been made, the children were conveyed by canal boats and wagons to the destination, and then their slavery began. Sometimes men who made a business of trafficking in children would transfer them to a factory district where they were kept in a dark cellar until the mill-owner, in want of hands, came to look them over and pick out those that he thought would be useful. Nominally the children were apprentices, but actually they were slaves and their treatment was most inhuman. The parish authorities, in order to get rid of the imbeciles, often bargained that the mill-owners take one idiot with every twenty children. What became of the idiots after they had passed into the hands of the capitalist is not known, but in most cases they did not last long and mysteriously disappeared.

No matter what the conditions and no matter how ill the children, they were worked without any visible vestige of human feeling. Even as late as 1840 in the evidence given before the Select Committee investigating the conditions of factories after the passage of the Reform Act of 1833, these were the conditions that the inspectors reported:

Q. “Have you many lace-mills in your district?”

A. “I have about thirty mills.”

Q. “What are the usual hours of work in these mills?”

A. “The usual hours are, about Nottingham, twenty hours a day, being from four o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night; about Chesterfield, the report I have had from the superintendent is, that they work twenty-four hours, all through the night, in several mills there.”

Q. “Are there many children and young persons in those mills?”

A. “The proportion is less in lace-mills than in others, but it is necessary to have some of them; the process of winding and preparing the bobbins and carriages requires children; those that I saw so employed were from ten to fifteen years of age.”

Q. “Are the children detained in the mills during a considerable period of the day and night?”

A. “I can speak from information derived from two or three mill-owners, and also more extensively from reports by one of the superintendents in my district; and I should say that in most of the mills they do detain them at night; in some of them, the report states that they are detained all night, in order to be ready when wanted.”

Q. “Are the children that are so detained liable to be detained throughout the day, and do they sometimes begin their work at twelve o’clock at night?”

A. “In the mills at Nottingham there are owners that make it a rule that they will not keep the children after eight, or nine, or ten o’clock, according to the inclination of the mill-occupier.”

Q. “Where are those children during the time they are detained in the mill?”

A. “When detained at night, and not employed I am told they are lying about on the floor.”

Q. “Is it customary to close at eight on Saturday evening in the lace-mills?”

A. “I think it is.”

Q. “How then do they compensate for the loss of those four hours work in those mills?”

A. “By working all night on Friday; those are the mills in which they pay so much for their power.”

Q. “Must not there be a considerable wear and tear upon the physical constitution of children who are kept in this state?”

A. “I think it is self-evident.”

Q. “Is there any possibility of their obtaining education under those circumstances?”

A. “None whatever, except on Sundays.”

Q. “But, after one hundred and twenty hours’ work in the week, is it possible that they can have much capacity for study on Sunday?”

A. “It is not always that the same children are kept twenty hours, because some mills have two complete sets of hands for their machinery, and they work the same set of hands only ten hours.”

Q. “But, even under those circumstances, it must frequently happen that the same children are employed during the night twice or thrice in the course of a week?”

A. “The practice generally is that they take the night-work for one week, and then the next week the morning-work.”

Q. “So that during one whole week they are employed in the night-work?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “At the end of a week, during which they have been employed in the night, do you think that they have much capacity left for study on Sunday?”

A. “No; my opinion is most decidedly that either turning out at four o’clock in the morning, or being kept out of bed at night, must be injurious to children, both to their physical constitution and their mental powers.”

Q. “The law, as it stands, does not prevent the children from being employed even twenty hours?”

A. “It does not apply to lace-mills.”

Q. “Therefore the period during which the child is employed depends upon the varying humanity of the individual proprietor of the mill?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “You say that it sometimes happens that the children come to the mill at five in the morning, and do not leave it till ten at night?”

A. “It is reported to me that it does so happen about Chesterfield.”

Q. “If a child is kept in winter till twelve o’clock at night, and has then to go home and return to the factory in the morning, a distance of two miles, does not he undergo fearful hardships?”

A. “Certainly.”450

The children who were apprenticed out to the mill-owners were fed on the coarsest kind of food and in the most disgusting way. They slept by turns, in relays, in beds that were never aired, for one set of children were turned into the beds as soon as another set had been driven out to their long and filthy toil. Some tried to run away and after that they were worked with chains around their ankles; many died and the little graves were unmarked in a desolate spot lest the number of the dead attract too much attention.

Sixteen hours a day, six days a week, was no uncommon time for children, and on Sunday they worked to clean the machine.

“In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”451

The agitation against these conditions led, in 1802, to an Act being passed by the influence of Sir Robert Peel for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills.

The immediate cause of this was the fearful spread through the factories in the Manchester district of epidemic diseases due to overwork, scanty food, wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, among the working people and especially among the children.

As far as reforming the conditions in which the children lived, the Act, however, was a dead letter, and in a debate introduced by Sir Robert Peel on June 6, 1815, one speaker, Horner, told of the sale of a gang of children with the effects of a bankrupt.

“A still more atrocious instance,” continued the speaker, “had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years ago, when a number of these boys apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer had been transferred (i. e., sold) to another and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine.”452

No longer could people ignore conditions such as these and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was empowered to take evidence on the state of children working in the manufactories of Great Britain. Despite the horrible nature of the evidence, when the Act resulting from the investigation was passed, all that it did was to make nine years the limit to age employment and twelve hours a day the working day for those under sixteen years. But it was limited in effect to cotton factories only, leaving the woollen and worsted factories absolutely untouched, and even in the matter of the cotton factories these provisions were frequently avoided.

Conditions continued to become worse instead of better, children of both sexes being beaten and overworked to make profit for the rich capitalists until 1830, when Richard Oastler, who had led in the fight against black slavery, had his attention called to the conditions under which the children of England were practically enslaved.453

Oastler was talking one night about his slavery reforms to a friend near Bradford and the remark was made to him: “I wonder you never turned your attention to the factory.” “Why should I?” replied the young abolitionist, “I have nothing to do with factories.” “Perhaps not,” was the answer, “but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in the West Indies and I assure you that there are cruelties practised in our mills on little children which I am sure if you knew you would try to prevent.”

The man who gave this suggestion, John Wood, was himself an owner of a mill and he admitted to Oastler that in his own mill the little children were worked from six in the morning until seven at night with a break of only forty minutes for lunch and that various devices, including beatings with sticks and straps and clubs, were employed to goad them on to renewed labour.

The very next day Oastler began a crusade which lasted for many weary years. He succeeded in interesting J. Hobhouse and M. T. Sadler, both members of the House of Commons, and the ten hours agitation began in and out of Parliament. In the course of a speech delivered in March, 1832, in favour of the ten hours bill, Sadler declared that so great was the demand in some districts for children’s labour that “an indispensable condition of marriage among the working classes was the certainty of offspring whose wages, beginning at six years old, might keep their inhuman fathers and mothers in idleness.”

“Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible,” exclaimed Sadler, “posterity will not believe it true—that a generation of Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would work lisping infancy a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded.”

But, to the nation’s eternal disgrace, that generation of Englishmen did exist, and Mr. Sadler told the House, detail by detail, of the evils and outrages of the whole abominable system. Excessive hours, low wages, immorality, ill-health—all were enumerated, and then he continued:

“Then in order to keep them awake, to stimulate their exertions, means are made use of to which I shall now advert, as a last instance of the degradation to which this system has reduced the manufacturing operatives of this country. Children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, and I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten, beaten in your free market of labour as you term it, like slaves. The poor wretch is flogged before its companions, flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cartwhip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong in England.”454

Interesting too was the fact brought out at this time that while these were the conditions in England, in the colonies black labour was protected to the extent that nine hours a day was the legal day for adults and young persons and children were not allowed to work more than six, while night work was simply prohibited.

The investigation of the Sadler Committee evoked the interesting information from one witness that children were never employed if they were under five.

The attitude of the employers toward the agitation can be best judged from the following extracts:

“Every man acquainted with the political history of the last century must know, that the labour of children was actually pointed out to the manufacturers by Mr. William Pitt, as a new resource by which they might be enabled to bear the additional load of taxation which the necessities of the State compelled him to impose. The necessity for labour created by this taxation has not yet abated; because the immense capital taken away by the enormous expenditure of the great wars arising out of the French Revolution, an expenditure which was mainly supported out of the industrial resources of the country, has not been replaced. But even independent of these considerations, and irrespective of a past which can never be recalled, we mean to assert, as we have done elsewhere, in broad terms and the plainest language, that the infant labour, as it is erroneously called—or the juvenile labour, as it should be called—in factories, is in fact a national blessing, and absolutely necessary for the support of the manifold fiscal burthens which have been placed upon the industry of this country. It is quite sufficient to say that the children of the operatives have mouths, and must be fed; they have limbs, and must be clothed; they have minds, which ought to be instructed; and they have passions, which must be controlled. Now, if the parents are unable to provide these requisites, and their inability to do so is just as notorious as their existence, it becomes absolutely necessary that the children should aid in obtaining them for themselves. To abolish juvenile labour, is plainly nothing else than to abolish juvenile means of support; and to confine it within very narrow limits, is just to subtract a dinner or a supper from the unhappy objects of mistaken benevolence.”455

The result of all this agitation and debate was the famous Act of 1833 introduced by Lord Shaftesbury which prohibited night work to persons under eighteen in cotton, woollen, and other factories, and provided that children from nine to thirteen years of age were not to work more than forty-eight hours a week and those from thirteen to eighteen not to work more than sixty-eight hours. Children under nine were not to be employed at all.

Even this much was not obtained until Oastler had succeeded in driving home to the British mind conditions such as are described in a speech delivered at Huddersfield, December 26, 1831, of which the following is an extract:

“I will not picture fiction to you,” said Oastler, in the early days of the factory movement, “but I will tell you what I have seen. Take a little female captive, six or seven years old; she shall rise from her bed at four in the morning of a cold winter day, but before she rises she wakes perhaps half a dozen times, and says, ‘Father, is it time? Father, is it time?’ And at last, when she gets up and puts her little bits of rags upon her weary limbs—weary yet with the last day’s work—she leaves her parents in their bed, for their labour (if they have any) is not required so early. She trudges alone through rain and snow, and mire and darkness, to the mill, and there for thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen hours is she obliged to work with only thirty minutes’ interval for meals and play. Homeward again at night she would go, when she was able, but many a time she hid herself in the wool in the mill, as she had not strength to go. And if she were one moment behind the appointed time; if the bell had ceased to ring when she arrived with trembling, shivering, weary limbs at the factory door, there stood a monster in human form, and as she passed he lashed her. This,” he continued, holding up an overlooker’s strap, “is no fiction. It was hard at work in this town last week. The girl I am speaking of died; but she dragged on that dreadful existence for several years.”456

While Oastler was delivering this speech and these conditions were rife, Malthus was revising the first edition of his Essay on Population.

CHAPTER XXIII

INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICA—PROTECTION FOR ANIMALS—FOUNDING OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN—SPREAD OF THE MOVEMENT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD—ORIGIN IN NEW YORK CITY.

FOLLOWING the Civil War, there began in the United States a humanitarian movement, an aftermath well becoming a unique and heartrending struggle. In that period, humane endeavour, like so many creepers, overran ordinary activities, and philanthropic movements unprecedented sprang up over the country.

Labour conditions until this period were about the same in the United States as they were in England. The Puritan idea had been that sin was in idleness, even for small children; “Colonial records bear evidence that it was a matter of conscience to keep children at work.”457