This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system, which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised the days before the passing of the Factory Acts.

A distinguished Spaniard, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, visiting England in 1807, and coming to Manchester, was truly horrified by what he saw here. It seemed to him that “a place more destitute of all interesting objects than Manchester it would not be easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing about fourscore thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.” Here you perceive the conflict of ideals between a priest-ridden country and a land of commerce: with the telling of beads pre-eminent in the one, and the counting of gold equally prominent in the other.

Espriella and his companions saw all the sights. They were taken to one of the great cotton manufactories and were shown a number of children at work there, the guide dwelling with satisfaction and delight on the infinite good resulting from employing infants at so early an age. “I listened,” says our horrified traveller, “without contradicting him, for who would lift up his voice against Diana at Ephesus!” and he left “with a feeling at heart which makes me thank God I am not an Englishman.”

“There is,” he continues, “a shrub in some of the East Indian islands which the French call veloutier; it exhales an odour that is agreeable at a distance, becomes less so as you draw nearer, and when you are quite close to it, is insupportably loathsome. Alciatus himself could not have imagined an emblem more appropriate to the commercial prosperity of England.”

“The guide remarked that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as manufactures. ‘You see these children, sir,’ said he. ‘In most parts of England poor children are a burden to their parents and to the parish; here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all expense; they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old, bring in money. There is no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.’

“I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion; and when he told me there was no rest in those walls, day or night, I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.

“‘These children, then,’ said I, ‘have no time to receive instruction.’

“‘That, sir,’ he replied, is the evil we have found. Girls are employed here from the age you see, till they marry, and then they know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or boil a potato. But we are remedying it now, and send the children to school for an hour after they have done work.’

“I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health.

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are as healthy as any children in the world. To be sure, many of them as they grow up go off in consumption, but consumption is the disease of the English.’”

This was not merely a temporary state of affairs, but an evil which came into being with the factory system, and grew steadily with its growth. Nor was it confined to any particular district. Not only in Lancashire, but everywhere that mills and factories were working, did the scandals of child-labour disgust Englishmen who did not happen to be mill-owners, and surprise and horrify foreigners, who at one and the same time saw England proposing to liberate the negro slaves, and permitting white slavery, almost as gross, in “the land of liberty.”

The things that Espriella saw in 1807 were the things, infinitely aggravated by the further extension of the factory system, that prevailed in 1832, when the scandal grew to such proportions that petitions were presented from all classes to Parliament, praying that legislation should be undertaken to end it. This movement resulted in a Factory Commission that revealed many unsuspected things. Not only were the factory owners guilty of working their miserable child-hands almost incredible hours, under the most dreadful conditions; but the parents, who practically sold their children into this slavery, were guilty equally with them.

The report of the Factory Commission is a voluminous affair of many hundreds of folio pages. Many of those pages of evidence taken on oath disclose curiously varying ideas of what constituted cruelty in punishment, or excessive hours of labour for children. For example, a child ten years of age employed at Wigan was punished for being late at the factory, as many others were, by being forced to work with a rope round her neck, to which a 20-lb. weight was attached. There were those who did not regard this as anything at all out of the way, and declared the children so punished did not mind it. We can only wonder they did not say more, and insist that the victims rather enjoyed this torture. Mary Hooton, the mother of the girl, acknowledged that she told the overlooker to beat her.

Humphrey Dyson, giving evidence as to the practice of a factory at Manchester, stated that the overlooker made a whip of a piece of leather about three inches wide and about half a yard long, and cut into fingers at the end. This was set into a wooden handle with a brass hook. With this instrument of torture the overlooker “punished” the children at his discretion. In many instances, mothers, superior to the Mary Hooton type, came and took these away and destroyed them, but the overlooker made others.

The wages of these child-workers, it seemed, ranged from one shilling and sixpence to four shillings a week, and these, according to a speech made in the House of Commons, were the conditions under which those scanty wages were earned:

“The following were the hours of labour imposed upon the children and young persons. Monday morning, commence work at six o’clock: at nine, half an hour for breakfast; begin again at half-past nine, and work till twelve. Dinner, one hour; work from one till half-past four. Drinking (afternoon meal), half an hour; work from five till eight; rest, half an hour; work from half-past eight till twelve, midnight; an hour’s rest. One in the morning till five, work; half an hour’s rest; work, half-past five till nine; breakfast, half an hour; work, half-past nine till twelve. Dinner, one hour. Work, one till half-past four. Drinking, half-past four till five. Work again from five till nine on the Tuesday evening, when the gang of adult and infant slaves were dismissed for the night, after having toiled thirty-nine hours, with nine intervals for refreshment, but none for bed.

“Wednesday and Thursday were occupied with day work only. From Friday morning till Saturday night, the same labour as that of Monday and Tuesday was repeated.”

The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,” and as “a blow at liberty.”