pete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident
that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty. The
apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small
employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that
they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain
independence--that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by
the bourgeoisie than under the factory system. Thus these small
employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon
the work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their
principal means of support is their own work. This peculiar midway
position of the Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so
rarely joined wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements.
Birmingham is a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town. There
are, however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in
these the factory system reigns supreme. The division of labour, which
is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry, for
example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of a great
multitude of women and children, and we find here {199} precisely the
same features reappearing which the Factories' Report presented,--the
work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers,
neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family
life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from
employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of
children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc. etc. The
children are described as half-starved and ragged, the half of them are
said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them get
nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon a
pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal--there were actually cases in
which children received no food from eight in the morning until seven at
night. Their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their
nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter. Hence they are all small
and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour. And
when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the
physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of
them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in Birmingham fit for
m