CHAPTER TWO
Dark Satanic Mills

"We have game laws, corn laws, cotton factories,
Spitalfields, the tillers of the land paid by poor rates, and
the remainder of the population mechanised into engines
for the manufactory of new rich men; yea the machinery
of the wealth of the nation made up of the wretchedness,
disease and depravity of those who should constitute the
strength of the nation."

5. T. Coleridge.

IN MAY, 1842, four men—Southwood Smith a doctor, Thomas
Tooke an economist, and R. J..Saunders and Leonard Horner,
factory inspectors—published a document which profoundly
troubled the conscience of England. It was called the First Report
of the Children's Employment Commission, It dealt with the
conditions of labour of children and young persons working in
coal mines. The commission had been set up two years before
by Lord Melbourne's government, largely through the per-
tinacity of Lord Ashley, an inconveniently well-connected young
Tory1 of strong evangelical tendencies who had taken up the
cause of the north-country factory operatives with an enthusiasm
which seemed to some of his contemporaries to border on the
hysterical.

Everybody knew that the conditions of life and labour in the
new factory towns of the north and midlands, until now a remote,
barren and little visited part of the country, were of a' rough and
primitive character. There had always been rough and primitive
Englishmen, and in these smoky and unsavoury districts they
were undoubtedly on the increase. It was part of the price that
had to be paid for the nation's growing wealth. But tie revela-
tions of the Commissioners' pages took the country by surprise.
From this document it appeared that the employment of
children of seven or eight years old in coal mines was almost
universal. In some pits they began work at a still earlier age:
a case was even recorded of a child of three. Some were employed
as "trappers," others for pushing or drawing coal trucks along
lHe was Palxnerston's son-in-law.
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