Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

  “Alas! alas! is it thus my wealth has been accumulated?” exclaimed Miss Brotherton, shuddering. “Is there no power in England, sir, righteous and strong enough to stay this plague?”

  “Miss Brotherton!” returned the clergyman, “such power, and such righteousness, MUST be found, or this plague, as you well call it, will poison the very life blood of our political existence; and long ere any serious danger is likely to be dreamed of by our heedless rulers, the bloated wealth with which this pernicious system has enriched a few, will prove a source of utter destruction to the many. Never, my dear young lady, did the avarice of man conceive a system so horribly destructive of every touch of human feeling, as that by which the low-priced agony of labouring infants is made to eke out and supply all that is wanting to enable the giant engines of our factories to out-spin all the world! But you must see it, Miss Brotherton, you must watch it with your own eyes, you must follow the hateful operations of this atrocious system into the thousands of sordid and forgotten huts which cover its miserable victims, ere you can possibly understand its moral mischief. There is no strength, no power in words to paint it.”

  “Its moral mischief,” said Mary, eagerly; “explain that to me, Mr. Bell, for it is the point I find most puzzling — why is it that these poor factory-people, because they labour more unremittingly, as it should seem, than all the world beside, why, for this reason, instead of being honoured for their industry, are they invariably spoken of with contempt and obliquy?”

  “Your question, Miss Brotherton, involves by far the most terrible portion of this frightful commercial mystery,” he replied; “but, as I have told you, nothing except personal investigation can enable the inquirer to arrive at the whole truth respecting it. Were a patient, accurate, and laborious detail of all the enormities committed, and all the sufferings endured, under the factory system, to be presented to the public, it would be thrown aside by some, as greatly too tedious for examination, and by others as a statement too atrocious to merit belief. Yet, England MUST listen to it, and that soon, or she may mourn her negligence when it is too late to repair it. That marvellous machinery of which we make our boast, Miss Brotherton, is not more perfect in its power of drawing out the delicately attenuated thread which it is our glory to produce, then the system for reducing the human labour necessary for its production to the lowest possible price is, for degrading the moral nature of the helpless slaves engaged in it.”

  “That the system has such a tendency I cannot doubt, after the repeated assurances which have reached me, that so it is,” replied Mary. “Nevertheless, I am still unable to comprehend why it should be so.”

  “You have only to take advantage of your residence near Ashleigh, Miss Brotherton, the dense population of which subsists almost wholly by factory labour, in order to understand, but too well, why this terrible result is inevitable! You are as yet too young a lady for me to expect that you should have very deeply studied the nature of the human mind, or made yourself fully aware how greatly the habits and character of all human beings depend upon education, and the circumstances in which they are placed. Nevertheless, if you turn your attention to the subject, you will not, young as you are, be long incapable of detecting the dangers which beset the hearts and souls of those whose unhappy destiny have made them factory labourers. The dark little circle in which they move from birth to death, from father to son, from mother to daughter, is so uniform, that almost any average individual case may fairly serve as a specimen of the whole class. Boys and girls, with few exceptions, labour indiscriminately altogether in the factories. While still almost children, they form connexions, and are married. Having worked in the mills, probably from five years old to the hour of their unweighed and thoughtless union, the boy assumes the duties of a husband with little more knowledge of moral or religious responsibility than the brute animal that labours with a thousand times less degradation in the fields; while the childish wife comes to her important task ignorant of every earthly usefulness, save what belongs to the mechanical drudgery in which throughout the whole of her short, sad life, she has been made to follow the uniform and ceaseless movements of machinery. She cannot sew, she cannot cook, she cannot iron, she cannot wash. Her mind is yet more untaught and undisciplined than her hands. She is conscious of no responsibility, she knows no law by which to steer her actions, or regulate her spirit, and becomes a mother as she became a wife, without one single thought of duty mixing itself with her increasing cares. By degrees, both the husband and the wife find employment in the factory less certain. It is for children, children, children, that the unwearied engine calls, and keenly does the hungry father, and the mother too, watch the growth of the little creatures to whom they have given birth, till the slight limbs have firmness enough to stand, and the delicate joints are sufficiently under the command of the frightened will to tie threads together under the potent inspiration of the overlooker’s strap. Then comes a state of deeper degradation still. The father is idle, for often he can get no work, and it is to the labour of his little ones that he looks for bread. Nature recoils from the spectacle of their unnatural o’erlaboured aspect as they return from their thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, hours of toil. He has not nerve to look upon it, and creeps to the gin-shops till they are hid in bed. The mother sees it all, and sternly screws her courage to the task of lifting their bruised and weary limbs upon their bed of straw, putting into their mouths the food she has prepared, their weary eyes being already closed in sleep, and preparing herself to wake before the sun on the morrow, that with unrelenting hand she may drag them from their unfinished slumber, and drive them forth again to get her food. This is no varnished tale, Miss Brotherton, but the bare, naked, hideous truth. And can you wonder that beings thus reared and ripened should form a degraded class? Can you wonder that all others should turn from them, as from a race with whom they have nothing in common? If some sad accident, preceding birth, disturbs the beautiful process by which nature prepares the noble being she has made to be lord of all, and an abortive creature comes to life, curtailed of all its fair proportions, both of mind and body, all within reach of the hapless prodigy shudder as they mourn, and the best and wisest among them pray to God that its span of life be short. But believe me when I tell you, Miss Brotherton, that the effect which the factories of this district is producing upon above two hundred thousand of its population, is beyond all calculation more deplorable, and many a child is born amongst them whose destiny, if fairly weighed against that of such a one as I have described, would appear incomparably more terrible.”

  “Can such things be, and the rulers of the land sit idly by to witness it?” cried Mary shuddering.

  “It seems as if the rulers of the land knew little, and cared less about it,” replied Mr. Bell. “The profoundly ignorant opinion that there is some connexion between our national prosperity, and the enormous fortunes amassed by some score of North-country manufacturers has, I believe, produced much of the lamentable non-interference of which the disinterested few complain, who are near enough to look upon the frightful game. Some individual voices have been most gloriously raised on this tremendous theme, and if they will be steadfast and enduring, they must and will prevail — for human nature, with all its vices, is not framed to look coldly on such horrors, and permit them. But the remedial process is so slow — it is so difficult to arouse the attention, and awaken the feelings of busy men concerning things at a distance, whose connexion with all that they deem important they are too ignorant of, or too preoccupied to trace, that the keenest observers, and those who would the most deeply deprecate any remedy but a legal one, begin to fear that mercy will be clamoured for with very dangerous rudeness, before the parliament of England shall have roused up its wisdom to the task of affording it.

  “And in what way, Mr. Bell, is it wished, or hoped, that the legislature should step forward to cure this dreadful evil? Is it proposed to abolish the use of machinery?”

  Mr. Bell smiled, and shook his head. />
  “You perhaps think,” said he, “that there is a great disproportion between my strong sense of the vice and suffering produced by the factory system, and the measure for its mitigation to which I now limit almost my wishes. But it would be vain to look back to the time when steam engines were not, and there would indeed be little wisdom in addressing our lamentations to their introduction. It is not the acquisition of any natural power, principle, or faculty, that we should deplore; all such, on the contrary, should be hailed as part and parcel of our magnificent birthright, and each new use we learn to make of the still much-unknown creation around us, ought to be welcomed with a shout of praise, as a fresh fulfilment of the supreme command ‘replenish the earth and subdue it.’ It is not from increased, or increasing science that we have any thing to dread, it is only from a fearfully culpable neglect of the moral power that should rule and regulate its uses, that it can be other than one of God’s best gifts.”

  “But how,” demanded Mary, “how, if machinery continues to be used, can any Act of Parliament prevent the necessity of employing children to wait upon its operations, instead of requiring the strength of men, as heretofore, to perform what the steam-engine does in their place?”

  “No Act of Parliament can be conceived capable of inducing a manufacturer to employ the weaker, and at the same time the more costly agent, in preference to a more powerful and cheaper one,” replied Mr. Bell. “No reasonable man would ask this, no reasonable man would desire it, and assuredly no reasonable man would attempt to enforce such an absurdity by law. No, Miss Brotherton, this mighty power, as surely given for our use as is the innocent air that fans the woodbine yonder, has at length, after some few thousand years of careless overlooking on our part, been revealed to us. But let us not fly in the face of benignant nature, and say like Caliban, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.”

  “If used aright the recannot be a doubt that this magnificent power might, in all its agencies, be made the friend of man. It requires no great stretch of ingenuity to conceive that it might be rendered at once a source of still increasing wealth to the capitalist, and of lightened labour to the not-impoverished operative. But that, as things are at present, this great discovery, and all the admirable ingenuity with which it is applied, acts as a ban instead of a blessing, upon some hundred thousands of miserable victims is most true, while all the benefit that can be shown as a balance to this horror, is the bloated wealth of a small knot of master-manufacturers. But so monstrous is this evil, that its very atrocity inspires hope, from the improbability that when once beyond all reach of contradiction its existence shall be known by all men, it should be permitted to continue.”

  “Then why is it not known?” demanded Mary, her colour heightened as she remembered her own entire ignorance upon the subject a few short weeks before, “surely it is the duty of all lookers-on to proclaim it to the whole world.”

  “Alas! Miss Brotherton! It is more easy to raise a voice, than to command attention to it. Loud and long must be the cry that shall awaken the indifferent, and rouse the indolent to action. But this loud, long cry, will be uttered, and by the blessing of God it will be listened to at last.”

  “But tell me Mr. Bell,” resumed his deeply interested auditor, “what is this moderate enactment in mitigation of these wretched people’s sufferings, which you say would content you?”

  “All that we ask for,” replied Mr. Bell, “all that the poor creatures ask for themselves, is that by Act of Parliament it should be rendered illegal for men women and children to be kept to the wearying unhealthy labour of the mills for more than ten hours out of every day, leaving their daily wages at the same rate as now.”

  “And would that suffice,” demanded Miss Brotherton with astonishment, “to effectually relieve the horrors you have been describing to me?”

  “Miss Brotherton it would,” replied the clergyman. I would be loath to weary you with details,” he continued, “but a few items may suffice to make you see how enormous are the benefits which would follow such an enactment. At present, if a large demand for manufactured goods arises, instead of being, as it ought, a blessing to the industrious hands that must supply it, it comes upon them as a fearful burden, threatening to crush the very springs of life in the little creatures that are chiefly to sustain it, while the golden harvest that it brings is not for them, but for their masters. For the miserable meed of an extra penny, or sometimes three-halfpence a day, the young slaves (who, observe, have no power of choice, for if they, or their parents for them, refuse, they are instantly turned off to literal starvation — no parish assistance being allowed to those who resist the regulations of the manufacturers), for this wretched equivalent for health and joy, are compelled, whenever our boasted trade flows briskly, to stand to their work for just as many hours as the application of the overlooker’s strap, or billy-roller, can keep them on their legs. Innumerable instances are on record of children falling from excess of weariness on the machinery, and being called to life by its lacerating their flesh. It continually happens that young creatures under fifteen years of age, are kept from their beds all night. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, hours of labour out of the twenty-four, are cases which recur continually, and I need not say with what effect upon these victims of ferocious avarice. Now not only would all this be mended, the positive bodily torture spared, and as far as is consistent with constant in-door occupation, the health of the labourers preserved, were it made unlawful to keep them at positive labour for more than ten hours of every day; not only would all this follow from the enactment, but innumerable other advantages, some of them more important still, would, beyond all question, be its consequence. In the first place, were there no power of executing great and sudden orders by irregular exactions of labour, the recurrence of those fearful intervals when the starving operatives are thrown out of employ by the accidents which cause a deficiency in the demand, would not happen — for in that case the capitalists would find themselves obliged to be beforehand with the demand, even though some portion of their enormous wealth should for a time lie idle. From this would also follow the necessity of often employing adult hands, where now the cheaper labour of children, forced from their very vitals through the day and night, may be had for the sin of demanding it. Then would the unnatural spectacle of a stalwart father idly waiting to snatch the wages from the little feverish hand of his o’er-laboured child be seen no more. Then would there be strength and spirits left in the young to profit by the Sunday-schools now so often ostentatiously opened in vain, because the only way in which a little piecer can keep holiday is by lying throughout the day stretched upon his straw in heavy sleep. Then too, the demoralizing process by which the heart of a mother is rendered hard as the nether mill-stone, by the necessity of goading her infants to their frightful toil, would cease. Boys and girls would no longer have to return to their homes at midnight — there would be time and inclination then, for those comfortable operations of the needle and the shears, which’

  Make old clothes look amaist as weel as new.’

  Then would not the disheartened ministers of God’s church strive in vain to make the reckless, joyless, worthless race listen to his words of faith and hope. Then, Miss Brotherton, they would arise from that state of outcast degradation which has caused your friends to tell you that it would be ‘unsafe, improper, and altogether Wrong,’ for you, and such as you, to make personal acquaintance with them.”

  “And do you really think all this mighty, this glorious good, would follow from an enactment so moderate, so reasonable, so every way unobjectionable?”

  “I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt, Miss Brotherton, that such good would follow it, and more, much more, than I have named — more than any one could believe or comprehend, who has not, like myself, been watching for years the misery, the vice, the degradation, which have resulted from the want of it.”