ours than by working ten hours, and
by working fifteen hours than by working twelve hours. But I do deny
that a great society in which children work fifteen, or even twelve
hours a day will, in the lifetime of a generation, produce as much as
if those children had worked less. If we consider man merely in a
commercial point of view, if we consider him merely as a machine for
the production of worsted and calico, let us not forget what a piece of
mechanism he is, how fearfully and wonderfully made. We do not treat a
fine horse or a sagacious dog exactly as we treat a spinning jenny. Nor
will any slaveholder, who has sense enough to know his own interest,
treat his human chattels exactly as he treats his horses and his dogs.
And would you treat the free labourer of England like a mere wheel or
pulley? Rely on it that intense labour, beginning too early in life,
continued too long every day, stunting the growth of the body, stunting
the growth of the mind, leaving no time for healthful exercise, leaving
no time for intellectual culture, must impair all those high qualities
which have made our country great. Your overworked boys will become a
feeble and ignoble race of men, the parents of a more feeble and more
ignoble progeny; nor will it be long before the deterioration of the
labourer will injuriously affect those very interests to which his
physical and moral energies have been sacrificed. On the other hand,
a day of rest recurring in every week, two or three hours of leisure,
exercise, innocent amusement or useful study, recurring every day, must
improve the whole man, physically, morally, intellectually; and the
improvement of the man will improve all that the man produces. Why is
it, Sir, that the Hindoo cotton manufacturer, close to whose door
the cotton grows, cannot, in the bazaar of his own town, maintain
a competition with the English cotton manufacturer, who has to send
thousands of miles for the raw material, and who has then to send the
wrought material thousands of miles to market? You will say that it is
owing to the excellence of our machinery. And to what is the excellence
of our machinery owing? How many of the improvements which have been
made in our machinery do we owe to the ingenuity and patient thought of
working men? Adam Smith tells us in the first chapter of his great work,
that you can hardly go to a factory without seeing some very pretty
machine,--that is his expression,--devised by some labouri