education clause, he calls an absurd and despotic measure directed
against the manufacturers, through which all children under twelve years
of age have been thrown out of employment; and with what results? The
children thus discharged from their light and useful occupation receive
no education whatsoever; cast out from the warm spinning-room into a cold
world, they subsist only by begging and stealing, a life in sad contrast
with their steadily improving condition in the factory and in Sunday
school. Under the mask of philanthropy, this law intensifies the
sufferings of the poor, and will greatly restrict the conscientious
manufacturer in his useful work, if, indeed, it does not wholly stop him.
{169}

The ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day to
attract general attention. We have already alluded to the Apprentices'
Act of 1802. Later, towards 1817, Robert Owen, then a manufacturer in
New Lanark, in Scotland, afterwards founder of English Socialism, began
to call the attention of the Government, by memorials and petitions, to
the necessity of legislative guarantees for the health of the operatives,
and especially of children. The late Sir Robert Peel and other
philanthropists united with him, and gradually secured the Factory Acts
of 1818, 1825, and 1831, of which the first two were never enforced, and
the last only here and there. This law of 1831, based upon the motion of
Sir J. C. Hobhouse, provided that in cotton mills no one under twenty-one
should be employed between half-past seven at night and half-past five in
the morning; and that in all factories young persons under eighteen
should work no longer than twelve hours daily, and nine hours on
Saturday. But since operatives could not testify against their masters
without being discharged, this law helped matters very little. In the
great cities, where the operatives were more restive, the larger
manufacturers came to an agreement among themselves to obey the law; but
even there, there were many who, like the employers in the country, did
not trouble themselves about it. Meanwhile, the demand for a ten hours'
law had become lively among the operatives; that is, for a law which
should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work longer
than ten hours daily; the Trades Unions, by their agitation, made this
demand general throughout the manufacturing population; the philanthropic
section of the Tory party, then led by Mich