Man’s abuse of his fellow man

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Website owner:  James Miller

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One does not have to live very long in this life to start learning about the badness that is in man. Maliciousness, deception and trickery are everywhere. My email box often contains email with attachments that I guess probably contain some type of computer malware. Someone is trying to do me harm. Recently we have been receiving a lot of scam type telephone calls. They generally don’t finish the first sentence before I quickly hang up. For money many people will do just about anything. They just have no principles or scruples at all. A very large portion of humanity just doesn’t care much at all about their fellow man; they have no compunction at all about exploiting the weak, preying on the naive, plundering their neighbor. It is everywhere. Doctors, dentists, automobile mechanics. The following is about the calloused exploitation of children in the late 1700's in England by factory owners:

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Universal History of the World, Golden Press, NY

Industrial Revolution and Nationalism

Willis Lindquist

The Factory System

1750 - 1800

...

It was against the law to ship slaves home to England, yet there seemed to be no law to prevent ordinary Englishmen from being treated as slaves by their own countrymen. The government did nothing to prevent them from being kidnaped and forced into years of unwilling service aboard ships or on West Indian plantations.

Since the public accepted such practices without much protest, it is hardly surprising that another kind of slavery was allowed to develop in England during the early period of the Industrial Revolution. At that time the large factories were run by water power, which meant that they had to be located near swift-running streams in the country, often miles from any population center from which workers could be hired. But factory owners did not have to depend upon adult workers to run their factories. Most of them used children. Hundreds of boys and girls from overcrowded poorhouses and church orphanages were turned over to factory owners.

Children as young as four or five were put to work picking up bits of cotton from the floor. Older ones watched machines and tied thread whenever there was a break. Their workday started at five or six in the morning. They had an hour or less for dinner, and continued working until seven or eight in the evening.

A West Indian slave master who visited one of these factories was shocked by the long hours. “I have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of slaves”, he said, “but we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work twelve and a half hours a day.”

Slave owners of the West Indies, having paid a great deal of money for their slaves, were naturally interested in caring for them well enough to keep them alive. But factory owners had no such worry. They had paid nothing for boys and girls working in their factories. If some of them died from poor food, lack of medical care, or overwork, they could be replaced at little or no cost by bringing in more children from an orphanage.

One of these replacements was a boy named Robert Blincoe, some of whose childhood experiences in cotton factories were later published. Blincoe was living in an orphanage near London in 1799 when men came asking for volunteers to work in a cotton mill. No one would be forced to go, they said. But those who went would have a chance to become ladies and gentlemen at the mill. They would be fed “on roast beef and plum pudding, be allowed to ride their masters’ horses, and have silver watches, and plenty of cash in their pockets.”

Blincoe volunteered. So did many of his friends, all of them from seven to nine years old. Even before they left the orphanage they began quarreling about who among them would be first to ride the horses. Blincoe soon learned the truth when he arrived at the cotton mill. There were no horses to ride. Instead of roast beef and plum pudding, there was a steady diet of black bread and oatmeal, and never quite enough of either to take away the pains of hunger. Blincoe rarely had enough to eat except when he could slip unnoticed into the yard where the pigs were being fattened and help himself to some of the food in their troughs.

During the long hours of the day in the mill, the children often felt the sting of the foreman’s whip to keep them awake. Those who fell asleep were kicked and beaten with fists. The foreman made a game of inventing savage forms of punishment. Blincoe once had his teeth filed. Another time he was hung up by his wrists, so that he was forced to hold up his legs to keep them from being caught in the moving machinery below him.

Under the law, these children were completely at the mercy of the mill owners for seven years. Those who attempted to escape had their feet put in irons. In some of the worst mills children tried to put an end to their suffering by committing suicide.

A member of parliament named Wortley answered complaints about child labor by saying that England would suffer if children would no longer be employed in factories. Adults hired to take the place of the children, he pointed out, would have to be paid salaries, and this would greatly increase the cost of labor and also the price of cotton goods.

Children sent to the factories by orphanages were rarely paid anything. Factory owners felt they were doing the nation a service by taking over the housing and feeding of children who would otherwise be supported at public expense. Even the government was pleased that boys and girls could be kept off the street and made to support themselves at so early an age. But in most factories nothing was done to protect their health or to educate them. As a result, they grew up broken in health and unfit for anything else except the simple factory work they had been doing for many years.

Adult factory workers, too, had to put up with long working hours and overcrowded conditions. The number of adults in cotton factories slowly increased as new inventions created work too difficult for children to do. Many improvements were made in the machinery, but little was done to improve the lot of the workers. One published pamphlet reported: “At Tydesley they work fourteen hours a day ... the door is locked in working hours, except half an hour at tea time: the workmen are not allowed to send for water to drink, in the hot factory: and even rain water is locked up, by the master’s order, otherwise they would be happy to drink even that.”

The factory system developed into a mighty force that was making England into the richest industrial nation in the world. Workmen who complained were regarded as unpatriotic, because they were placing their own personal interests above the best interests of the nation.

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15 Jan 2021