dvance.

Let us turn to another side of the factory system which cannot be
remedied by legislative provisions so easily as the diseases now
engendered by it. We have already alluded in a general way to the nature
of the employment, and enough in detail to be able to draw certain
inferences from the facts given. The supervision of machinery, the
joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative's
thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying
his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords
the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly
speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process
conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental
powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every
day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a
moment's rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the
spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to
snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of
fines. This condemnation to be buried alive in the mill, to give
constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture
by the operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run
stunting in the highest degree. There is no better means of inducing
stupefaction than a period of factory work, and if the operatives have,
nevertheless, not only rescued their intelligence, but cultivated and
sharpened it more than other working-men, they have found this possible
only in rebellion against their fate and against the bourgeoisie, the
sole subject on which under all circumstances they can think and feel
while at work. Or, if this indignation against the bourgeoisie does not
become the supreme passion of the working-man, the inevitable consequence
is drunkenness and all that is generally called demoralisation. The
physical enervation and the sickness, universal in consequence of the
factory system, were enough to induce Commissioner Hawkins to attribute
this demoralisation thereto as inevitable; how much more when mental
lassitude is added to them, and when the influences already mentioned
which tempt every working-man to demoralisation, make themselves felt
here too! There is no cause for surprise, therefore, that in the
manufacturing towns especially, drunkenness and sexual ex