writing on the wall and granted out-door relief to a greater number of applicants than immediately after the introduction of the new measure, their ideal means of succor was still the workhouse. And all this in face of the universal indignation which was manifested throughout the whole country. There is no wonder, then, that Tory politicians, as well as radical friends of labor, were remorseless in their denunciation of both the Whigs and their New Poor Law. The hatred displayed by the Tories was nurtured by their instinctive fear of the newly-formed capitalist class which began to assert its power in quite an arrogant way. But it was this very acquisition of power by the middle class that caused the apprehension of the radicals. Their name was legion who believed with Bronterre, even as early as 1837, that the object of the New Poor Law was to reduce labor "to the lowest rate of remuneration at which existence can be sustained". The new class was pictured as a band of "the greatest tyrants over the people ", since "the most formidable, as well as the most remorseless of all despotisms, is the despotism of money ".1 The last session of Parliament in 1838 was bombarded with petitions bearing the signatures of 269,000 persons who requested the repeal of the new measure, whereas only thirty-five petitions with 952 signatures were presented in favor of retention of the New Poor Law. The people felt themselves outraged and expressed their resentment at public meetings, some of which were attended by crowds whose numbers were estimated at 300,000. The Whigs, however, were not to be daunted, and the party in power continued to remain brutally heedless to the desperate cry of millions of men and women. 1 See Bronterre's National Reformer, January 28, Feb. 11 and March 18, 1837. 2 Hansard, op. cit., vol. xli, 1838, pp. 1005-1006. CHAPT Call Chartism by what name you will, its principles have sprung from the infant blood of English children; and though you water them with the blood of millions, yet, by the God who made us all equal, I swear that I will take the little children, their fathers, and their mothers, out of your toils and grasp, or die in the attempt! -Feargus O'Connor. LABOR LEGISLATION AND TRADE UNIONISM THE working class was keenly disappointed in the Whigs for their hostile attitude towards labor legislation. It was the ultra Tories, Richard Oastler, Michael Thomas Sadler and Lord Ashley who led the campaign against the 1 1 Richard Oastler (1789-1861), the "king of the factory children," was a Tory and an advocate of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. He led the agitation for the ten-hour day from 1830 onwards. In 1830 he began his series of fiery letters to the Leeds Mercury, and afterwards to the Leeds Intelligencer, on the "Yorkshire Slavery." He vigorously opposed the New Poor Law, and was imprisoned for debt in 1840; the Whigs repeatedly offered to pay his debt and confer other favors upon him if he would give up his agitation against the Poor Laws. He refused to make any deal with his conscience, and for three years remained in prison, whence he published his Fleet Papers, in which he incessantly urged the need of factory reform and the abolition of the Poor Laws. Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835), Tory, philanthropist and writer on political economy, introduced a bill for restricting child labor in 1831. He was chairman of the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the condition of the children employed in factories, and his solic evils of the factory system and demanded the amelioration of workmen's conditions. The Short Time Committee was justly described as a curious "combination of Socialists, Chartists and ultra Tories ", but the Whig representatives were at all times conspicuous by their absence from among those who fought the people's battle.2 The fight was forced on the advocates of labor legislation by the condition of the men, women and children who were employed in factories. It started at the time when the employers' demand for freedom of contract was in complete harmony with the laissez-faire doctrine of the economists. This doctrine proclaimed it a "natural law" that employers and employees should be allowed to make what arrangements they pleased between themselves, without interference on the part of the government. It required a kind of philosophical courage, besides a warm feeling for the exploited, to oppose the then prevailing notions of social justice. When the Ten-Hour Movement grew stronger, the ethical and abstract ideas were left to take care of themselves, and the opponents of the movement began to promulgate the economic or commercial argument for which Nassau Senior stood sponsor. The whole ques itous and unremitting work was said to have been a contributing cause to his premature death. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, afterwards Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885), Tory, became interested in factory children in 1832 and introduced a Ten-Hour Bill in 1833. He was the most zealous advocate of labor legislation and an ardent social reformer. 1 The Leeds Mercury, March 23, 1844. 2 The most prominent leaders in the agitation against child labor, besides Oastler, Sadler and Ashley, were the Rev. J. R. Stephens, the Chartist leader; John Doherty, the general secretary of the Federation of Cotton Spinners, a Chartist; George Condy, the editor of the Manchester and Salford Advertiser; Philip Grant; and later the radical John Fielden, who took Lord Ashley's place during his temporary retirement from the House in 1846. tion was then presented from the point of view of economic expediency. Starting with the assumption that in the cotton manufacture "the whole profit is derived from the last hour", and that "if the hours of working were reduced by one hour per day, net profit would be destroyed; if they were reduced by an hour and a half, even gross profit would be destroyed",-Senior reached the ingenious conclusion that it was in the interest of the working classes themselves to oppose the reduction of the hours of labor, which would be "attended by the most fatal consequences". As to the exertion and overwork, Senior thought that the work of children and young persons in the cotton mills was mere confinement, attention and attendance ", and it was scarcely possible to feel fatigue after "extremely long hours" of work.1 1 66 This last view of Mr. Senior was, to say the least, a preposterous denial of actual conditions. The government reports, as well as the accounts in contemporary newspapers and magazines, tell quite a different story. Dr. Kay, himself an opponent of state interference with the hours of labor, depicts the condition of the factory laborer in the following lines: "Whilst the engine runs the people must work,-men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine-breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering,—is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness." Another opponent of the factory act, Mr. Roebuck, wrote from Glasgow in 1838 that he visited a cotton mill where he saw a sight that froze his blood. 992 1 Nassau William Senior, Letters on the Factory Act, London, 1837, pp. 12-13. 2 James Philip Kay, Moral and Physical Conditions of the Operatives Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 1832, p. 24. The place was full of women, young all of them, some large with child, and obliged to stand twelve hours each day. Their hours are from five in the morning to seven in the evening, two hours of that being for rest, so that they stand twelve clear hours. The heat was excessive in some of the rooms, the stink pestiferous, and in all an atmosphere of cotton flue. I nearly fainted.1 The employment of women and children was attacked by Ashley and his followers on the ground that it inevitably breaks up the family. Of the 419,560 factory operatives in Great Britain in 1839, for instance, 192,887, or 46 per cent were under eighteen years of age; the 242,296 females included 112,192 girls under eighteen years of age. Only 96,569, or 23 per cent, were adult male operatives. Women were reported to return to the factory three or four days after confinement and dripping wet with milk while at work. The pestilent atmosphere and the inevitable contact of many people in one work-room had a detrimental effect on the morals of the factory employees. In Manchester three-fourths of such employees at the age of from fourteen to twenty years were reported unchaste.3 An estimate of sexual morality,-writes one of the commissioners, cannot readily be reduced to figures; but if I may trust my own observations and the general opinion of those with whom I have spoken, as well as the whole tenor of the testimony furnished me, the aspect of the influence of factory life upon the morality of the youthful female population is most depressing.* 1 R. E. Leader, Life of Roebuck, quoted by B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison in the History of Factory Legislation, Westminster, 1903, pp. 91-92. 2 See Ashley's Speech of March 15, 1844, in Hansard, op. cit., vol. lxxiii. Cf. Report from Commissioners Appointed to Collect Information in the Manufacturing Districts, 1834, Cowell Evidence, p. 57. Ibid., Hawkins' Report, p. 4. |