Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 7

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, the instant they can work, to the mills or the mines. Those whom nature has made their protectors, have become their oppressors. The thirst for idleness, intoxication, or sensuality, has turned the strongest of the generous, into the most malignant of the selfish passions.
The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance