Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 7

the legislature, as to the

practicability of substituting a compulsory ten-hours' bill for the twelve
hours' at present in operation. Anxious to avoid all topics on which
there is a difference of opinion among able and patriotic men, we
merely state this prevalence and precocity of juvenile labour in the
manufacturing and mining districts as a fact which all must deplore,
and which is attended with the most unhappy effects on the rising
generation. The great majority, probably nine-tenths, of all the workers
in cotton-mills or printfields, are females. We have heard much of the
profligacy and licentiousness which pervade such establishments; but
though that may be too true in some cases, it is far from being universal,
or even general; and there are numerous instances of female virtue
being as jealously guarded and effectually preserved in such
establishments, as in the most secluded rural districts. The real
evils--and they follow universally from such employment of juvenile
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 the arrival of the happy period when they may live on their
offspring, not their offspring on them. Thus the purest and best
affections of the heart are obliterated on the very threshold of life. That
best school of disinterestedness and virtue, the _domestic hearth_,
where generosity and self-control are called forth in the parents, and
gratitude and affection in the children, from the very circumstance of
the dependence of the latter on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than
destroyed, it is made the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists
only to nourish the selfish and debasing passions. Children come to be
looked on, not as objects of affection, but as instruments of gain; not as
forming the first duty of life and calling forth its highest energies, but
as affording the first means of relaxing from labour, and permitting a
relapse into indolence and sensuality. The children are, practically
speaking, sold for slaves, and--oh! unutterable horror!--_the sellers are
their own parents_! Unbounded is the demoralization produced by this
monstrous perversion of the first principles of nature. Thence it is that
it is generally found, that all the beneficent provisions of the legislature
for the protection of infant labour are so generally evaded, as to render
it doubtful whether any law, how stringent soever, could protect them.
The reason is apparent. The parents of the children are the chief
violators of the law; for the sake of profit they send them out,