As a result of the appalling poverty which developed, it soon became
necessary for poor parents to permit their children to go into the
factories. The mighty machines were far too powerful for the prejudices
of parental hearts. Child wage-workers became common. They were
subjected to little better conditions than the parish apprentices had
been; in fact, they were often employed alongside of them. Fathers were
unemployed and frequently took meals to their little ones who were at
work--a condition which sometimes obtains in some parts of the United
States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of
Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor and
oppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18]

During all this time, let it be remembered, the English philanthropists,
and among them many capitalists, were agitating against negro slavery in
Africa and elsewhere, and raising funds for the emancipation of the
slaves. Says Gibbins,[19] "The spectacle of England buying the freedom
of black slaves by riches drawn from the labor of her white ones affords
an interesting study for the cynical philosopher."

As we read the accounts of the distress which followed upon the
introduction of the new mechanical inventions, it is impossible to
regard with surprise or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the
misguided "Luddites" who went about destroying machinery in their blind
desperation. Ned Lud, after whom the Luddites were named, was an idiot,
but wiser men, finding themselves reduced to abject poverty through the
introduction of the giant machines, could see no further than he. It was
not to be expected that the masses should understand that it was not the
machines, but the institution of their private ownership, and use for
private gain, that was wrong. And just as we cannot regard with surprise
the action of the Luddites in destroying machinery, it is easy to
understand how the social unrest of the time produced Utopian movements
with numerous and enthusiastic adherents.

The Luddites were not the first to make war upon machinery. In 1758, for
example, Everet's first machine for dressing wool, an ingenious
contrivance worked by water power, was set upon by a mob and reduced to
ashes. From that time on similar outbreaks occurred with more or less
frequency; but it was not until 1810 that the organized bodies of
Luddites went from town to town, sacking factories and destroying