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troduction of machinery, which, needing no physical force, made cheap child-labour available. It is, however, true that Pitt left the enormous abuse of child-labour which grew up in his time entirely unrestricted by law, while he strongly urged the propriety of turning the industry of children to profit. In a speech on the depressed condition of the labouring classes he observed: Experience has already shown how much could be done by the industry of children, and the advantages of early employing them in such branches of manufactures as they are capable to execute. The extension of schools of industry is also an object of material importance. If anyone would take the trouble to compute the amount of all the earnings of the children who are already educated in this manner, he would be surprised when he came to consider the weight which their support by their own labours took off the country, and the addition which, by the fruits of their toil and the habits to which they were formed, was made to its internal opulence.'1

Within carefully guarded limits, child-labour 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 very 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 at 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-labour was 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 or 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

Pari. Hist. xxxii. 710.

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. Instances of direct and aggravated cruelty to particular children were probably rare, and there appears a general agreement of evidence that they were confined to the small factories. But labour prolonged for periods that were utterly inconsistent with the health of children was general. In forty-two out of forty-three factories at Manchester, it was stated before the Parliamentary Committee in 1816 that the actual hours of daily work ranged from twelve to fourteen, and in one case they were fourteen and a half. 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 of 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.'

It was one of the effects of the immense development of the cotton manufacture, that negro slavery in America, which at the time of Washington seemed likely to be extinguished by an easy and natural process, at once assumed gigantic dimensions. It was hardly more horrible, however, than the white slavery which, for some years after the establishment of the factory system, prevailed both in England and on the Continent. Some of the great manufacturers were fully sensible of the evil. To the first Sir Robert Peel, who was among the greatest of them, is chiefly due the first Factory Act, which was carried in 1802; and the Ashtons, the Ashworths, and the Gregs were early noted

The facts relating to the factory system will be found in the reports of several parliamentary committees on the subject, and in the debates on the different factory laws. See too Alfred's History of the Factory Movement; the correspondence between Senior and Horner on the Factory Act' (1837); the published speeches of Lord Ashley; Kay's Moral and Physical Condition of the Working

VOL. VI.

Classes; Bulwer's England and the English, book ii. ch. v. ; and the skilful analysis of the evidence taken before the Factory Commissioners, drawn up in the interests of the manufacturers in 1834. On the foreign factories see a report of Ch. Dupin on the labour of children, laid before the French House of Peers in 1840 and 1841, and Gillet, Sur l'Emploi des Enfants (1840).

for the conspicuous and enlightened humanity which they displayed in the management of their factories. But the struggle for the Factory Acts was on the whole carried on in the teeth of fierce class opposition, as well as strong intellectual and political tendencies, and the success of those Acts will furnish one of the most curious and instructive pages in the history of the nineteenth century.

In some most essential respects the growth of the great manufacturing towns was altering the character of England. For many generations after the Revolution, the county members formed especially the independent, and also the mobile element in the House of Commons; and in the Reform plans of both Pitts an increase of county representation was put forward as the most efficacious means of infusing into it health, purity, and energy. The movement of progress and of change in all its forms was very languid, and the feeling of the country was essentially conservative. The English Constitution, as it appears in the writings of Burke, and as it in fact existed for many generations after the Revolution of 1688, was a thing which owed its excellence quite as much to the singular union in the English character of self-reliance, practical good sense, love of compromise, and dislike to theoretical, experimental, or organic change, as to any law that can be found in the Statute-book. The patient acquiescence in all kinds of theoretical irregularities and anomalies provided they worked well; the reverence for habit, precedent, and tradition; the dislike to pushing principles to their extreme logical consequences, and the essential moderation which the English people have almost always shown even in the periods of their greatest excitement, have been main causes of the longevity and the reality of their freedom. It is a memorable fact that there are few periods in English history in which so many important laws were made for the protection of religious, political, and individual liberty as during the great Royalist reaction of the Restoration;1 while, as Burke has abundantly shown, the prescriptive, hereditary, and conservative character of the English monarchy was never more carefully and elaborately asserted than by the

See a very remarkable enumeration of these measures in Buckle's Hist. of Civilisation, i. 350–353.

statesmen who made the Revolution of 1688.

The sound

practical judgment and the systematic moderation of the Governments which carried England safely through the long period of a foreign dynasty and of a disputed succession, have been abundantly shown in the present work. Nor were these qualities confined to the eighteenth century. The intelligent middle classes, who were the true centre of political power in that golden period of the Constitution between the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Reform Bill of 1867, eminently possessed them. The conduct of the Whig Ministers in the years that immediately followed their great Reform Bill is well deserving of the study of all political thinkers. Sir Robert Peel, who led the Opposition, possessed an administrative skill which none of his contemporaries and scarcely any of his predecessors could rival, and, with a sagacity that he did not always show, he at once accepted the Reform Bill he had so strenuously opposed, and raised the banner of administrative reform. There were not wanting those behind the Whig Ministers who urged them. passionately, to meet this policy by the obvious party device of a further movement for organic change, and availing themselves of a tide of public feeling, which had almost risen to the height of revolution, to attack the House of Lords and to effect a complete transformation of the Constitution. Nothing, in my opinion, in the whole course of English parliamentary history is more deserving of admiration, nothing is more characteristic of the best traditions of English public life, than the firmness and the patriotism with which the Whig leaders resisted the temptation, repressed the revolutionary tendency among their followers, applied themselves to calming passions which were becoming dangerous to the historic framework of English government, and risked all their popularity by effecting one of the most needed but most unpopular of administrative changes, the reform of the old poor law.

How far the spirit which produced such a course of policy continues may well be doubted. The old elements of the English character remain, but their proportions are differently mixed. The habits and mental tendencies of a people who are essentially agricultural will always differ from those of a people. where the predominant political power rests mainly in great

towns, and this, through the astonishing growth of manufactures, has now become pre-eminently the character of England. It has been noticed that of towns of more than forty thousand inhabitants there are now fifty-five in Great Britain and Ireland, twenty-eight in France, twenty-four in Italy, twenty-one in Prussia, fourteen in Russia, and six in Austria. In France revolutionary movements in the great towns have often reversed by violence the conservative tendencies in the country. In England the growing influence of great towns is shown in a gradual modification of the type and habits of political thought. When opinions are formed and discussed by great masses of men, and especially by men of the artisan class, when they are constantly made the subjects of debate before large and popular audiences and in a spirit of fierce controversy, the empire of habit, tradition, and reverence will naturally diminish; anomalies and irregularities of all kinds will be keenly felt; institutions will be judged only by their superficial aspects and by their immediate and most obvious consequences; remote and indirect consequences, however real and grave, will have little influence on opinion; nothing that is complex or subtle in its character and nothing that is not susceptible of an immediate popular and plausible treatment is regarded; and the appetite for experiment, for change, for the excitement of political agitation, steadily grows. The alteration of mental habits partly due to the great increase of town life, and partly also to other causes, may, I think, be clearly traced, stealing over the English character. The political pulse beats more quickly. A touch of fever has passed into the body politic, and the Constitution is moving more rapidly through its successive phases of transformation and of decay.

The most serious political questions that have agitated England in the nineteenth century have all been very largely affected by the great industrial inventions of the eighteenth century. It was these inventions that gave parliamentary reform its supreme and pressing importance. The anomaly of rising and flourishing towns without representatives while decayed and deserted villages sent one or two members to Parliament was indeed not new, but it was the vast and sudden transfer of population and wealth to the northern half of Cunningham's Conditions of Social Well-being (1878).

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