females in great
numbers in laborious but lucrative employment--are the emancipation
of the young from parental control, the temptation held out to
idleness in the parents from the possibility of living on their
children, and the disqualifying the girls for performing all the
domestic duties of wives and mothers in after life.

These evils are real, general, and of ruinous consequence. When
children--from the age of nine or ten in some establishments, of
thirteen or fourteen in all--are able to earn wages varying from 3s.
6d. to 6s. a-week, they soon become in practice independent of
parental control. The strongest of all securities for filial
obedience--a sense of dependence--is destroyed. The children assert
the right of self-government, because they bear the burden of
self-maintenance. Nature, in the ordinary case, has effectually
guarded against this premature and fatal emancipation of the young,
by the protracted period of weakness during childhood and
adolescence, which precludes the possibility of serious labour being
undertaken before the age when a certain degree of mental firmness
has been acquired. But the steam-engine, amidst its other marvels,
has entirely destroyed, within the sphere of its influence, this
happy and necessary exemption of infancy from labour. Steam is the
moving power; it exerts the strength; the human machine is required
only to lift a web periodically, or damp a roller, or twirl a film
round the finger, to which the hands of infancy are as adequate as
those of mature age. Hence the general employment of children, and
especially girls, in such employments. They are equally serviceable
as men or women, and they are more docile, cheaper, and less given to
strikes. But as these children earn their own subsistence, they soon
become rebellious to parental authority, and exercise the freedom of
middle life as soon as they feel its passions, and before they have
acquired its self-control.

If the effect of such premature emancipation of the young is hurtful
to them, it is, if possible, still more pernicious to their parents.
Labour is generally irksome to man; it is seldom persevered in after
the period of its necessity has passed. When parents find that, by
sending three or four children out to the mills or into the mines,
they can get eighteen or twenty shillings a-week without doing any
thing themselves, they soon come to abridge the duration and cost of
education, in order to accelerate