both
spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the
machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but
only flexibility of finger. Men are, therefore, not only not needed for
it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the
hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore,
naturally almost superseded by them. Hence, the more the use of the
arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or water-
power, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work
more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their
places. In the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost
exclusive possession of the throstles; among the mules one man, an adult
spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes superfluous), and several
piecers for tying the threads, usually children or women, sometimes young
men of from eighteen to twenty years, here and there an old spinner {141}
thrown out of other employment. At the power-looms women, from fifteen
to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however,
rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. Among the
preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and
there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. Besides all these,
the factories employ numbers of children--doffers--for mounting and
taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an
engineer for the steam-engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual
work of the mills is done by women and children. This the manufacturers
deny.

They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does
not supersede adult male operatives. According to these tables, rather
more than half of all the factory-workers employed, _viz_., 52 per cent.,
were females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives more than
half were over eighteen years old. So far, so good. But the
manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the adults
were men and how many women. And this is just the point. Besides this,
they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the
men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and
still they have not the courage to tell the whole truth. These
publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions, crooked
statements, with calculations of average