Sir John Cam Hobhouse and Richard Oastler on the Factory Bill of 1831 s2

John Fielden on the need for Factory Reform, 1836

(John Fielden (1784-1849), a cotton manufacturer at Todmorton and Radical MP for Oldham, was a strong supporter of the factory reform movement. John Fielden. The Curse of the Factory System; or a short account of the origin of factory cruelties; of the attempts to protect the children by law; of their present sufferings; our duty towards them; injustice of Mr. Thomson's bill; the folly of the Political Economists; a warning against sending the children of the South into the factories of the North, 1836, pp. iii-iv, 17-18,24,31-2, 35, 61; in J. T. Ward, ed., The Factory System, Vol..II, Birth and Growth (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 120-24.)

When I consented to become a Member of Parliament, it was not with a view of joining party men or aiding in party movements; but, in order to assist, by my role, in doing such things as I thought would benefit the labouring people as well on the land as in the factory and at the loom. I have, all my years of manhood, been a Radical Reformer, because I thought Reform would give the people a power in the House of Commons that would secure to them that better condition of which they are worthy. There is no natural cause for our distresses. We have fertile land, the finest herds and flocks in the world, and the most skilful husbandmen; we have fine rivers and ports, and shipping unequalled; and our ingenuity and industry have given us manufactures which ought to complete these blessings. I am a manufacturer; but I am not one of those who think it time we had dispensed with the land. I think that these interests are all conducive to the prosperity of the nation; that all must go together, and that the ruin of either will leave the others comparatively insecure. But, with all our means of prosperity, and, if we believe the high authority which reminds us of it every session of Parliament, with all the prosperity that we have, I cannot believe it necessary that the manufacturers should work their labourers in the manner that they do. The proposition, therefore, of my Lord Ashly, to diminish the excessive labour of those who work in factories, is one for which I cordially thank him, and in which he shall have my support. I know it to be one of bare justice and humanity. I have long thought it, and have aided those who were more active than myself in attempts to obtain it. I am concerned in a very large business myself, and as my manufacture, my home trade and my export trade, is almost exclusively of that sort in which the Americans attempt to compete with us, I must be one of the first to be ruined, if foreign competition is to ruin it. The object of the following pages is to show that the workpeople have been and are cruelly treated; that they have not idly asked for protection, but that humanity and justice require it; that we shall do ourselves no harm by granting it to them; but always avowing, that I would cast manufactures to the winds, rather than see the workpeople enslaved, maimed, vitiated, and broken in constitution and in heart, as these pages will but too amply prove they now are. JOHN FIELDEN London, 17th May, 1836 . . . [In 1833 the Government] were in this dilemma: the Committees had always discovered the same cruelties in practice; the same overworking, and the same horrifying results ... They could not refuse to protect the children. But they are 'political economists'; and though, as men, they could no longer screw up their minds and hearts so far as to sacrifice any more limbs and lives of infants, the science would not suffer them to invade the 'freedom of industry', by involving the adult in that protection which they were obliged to give to the child. It is this absurd attempt to separate the adult from the child in its labour, that has rendered every Act that has ever been passed to give protection to children, almost void; and it is only by forcing the masters to obey this Act now in existence, that will bring them, and after them the Government, to yield to the really practicable and salutary measure that the whole of the factory labourers require at their hands. [The Inspectors] . . . amuse themselves in writing up to the Government, suggestions, that a short Act may be passed to carry us back not to the time proposed by Lord Ashley, but to that of Sir John Hobhouse's Act. ... The Ministers stand, therefore, in this position: they threw out Lord ASHLEY's Ten-hour Bill, because Commissioners of their own told them it did not give protection to children, whose labour ought to be restricted to eight hours. Then, as their Eight-hour Act will not work pleasantly, upon the advice of their Inspectors, they want to drive us back to twelve hours, because that is adequate protection! But, we, who contend for a Ten-hour Bill, are now just where we were when the Ministry began to dabble officiously in affairs which it did not understand.... I well remember being set to work in my father's mill when I was little more than ten years old; my associates, too, in the labour and in recreation are fresh in my memory. Only a few of them are now alive; some dying very young, others living to become men and women; but many of those who live have died off before they attained the age of fifty years, having the appearance of being much older, a premature appearance of age which I verily believe was caused by the nature of the employment in which they had been brought up. For several years after I began to work in the mill, the hours of labour in our works did not exceed ten in the day, winter and summer, and even with the labour of those hours, I shall never forget the fatigue I often felt before the day ended, and the anxiety of us all to be relieved from the unvarying and irksome toil we had gone through before we could obtain relief by such play and amusements as we resorted to when liberated from our work. I allude to this fact, because it is not uncommon for persons to infer that, because the children who work in factories are seen to play like other children when they have time to do so, the labour is, therefore, light, and does not fatigue them. The reverse of this conclusion I know to be the truth. I know the effect which ten hours' labour had upon myself; I who had the attention of parents better able than those of my companions to allow me extraordinary occasional indulgence. And he knows very little of human nature, who does not know that, to a child, diversion is so essential, that it will undergo even exhaustion in its amusements. I protest, therefore, against the reasoning that, because a child is not brought so low in spirit as to be incapable of enjoying the diversions of a child, it is not worked to the utmost that its feeble frame and constitution will bear ...... But the overworking does not apply to children only; the adults are also overworked. The increased speed given to machinery within the last thirty years, has, in very many instances, doubled the labour of both ...... We have nothing to fear from foreign competition. It is the greatest humbug that Englishmen were ever made to believe in; but from competition amongst ourselves we have everything to fear; and if we do not restrain ourselves in time, or the legislature do not restrain us, we shall very soon destroy ourselves ...