58 ENGLISHSAGA

to buy or hire a roomful of power looms, a resolve to keep his
expenses and consequently his prices down against all rivals and
a plentiful supply of cheap labour. The machine took the place
of the domestic craftsman whose hereditary skill it rendered
useless, whose price it undercut and whose ancient markets it
captured. If continued unemployment did not drive him to
lower his wage demands, women and children could be hired
for the factories at half or a third of his price. So could
filthy, barefooted Irish paupers who were always ready to leave
their own overcrowded and half-starving island at almost any
wage. They were shipped into Liverpool and Glasgow in
tens of thousands to feed the mills. By a curious nemesis, their
ways of life— little better than those of the pigstye— -still further
depressed the wages and social standards of England and
Scotland.

«••••••

The first great surge of invention affected the textile trade
and principally the manufacture of cotton goods. It was in the
humid valleys of south Lancashire that the factory system
appeared. The earliest cotton mills, worked by water power
though later by steam, were largely operated by apprentice
pauper children from the urban slums who, consigned by the
Guardians to the millowners in cartloads, were housed or rather
packed in barrack-like 'prentice houses (where they slept in
shifts) and kept more or less continuously at work until they
either died or reached an age at which their labour ceased to be
profitable. The working hours of one mill in 1815 were from
5 a.m. till 8 p.m. with half an hour's grace for breakfast and
dinner. There were no Saturday half-holidays, and Sundays
were partly devoted to cleaning the machinery. One instance is
recorded of ' unwanted children being taken when the mill was
idle to a neighbouring common and turned loose to shift for
themselves.1

The early factory reformers — a little minority of humane
men, several of them millowners like the first Sir Robert Peel-
concentrated their efforts on regulating the worst abuses of
indentured child labour in the cotton mills. Later they were
able to extend their tentative reforms to what was ironically

e proprietors denied that the children were "turned adrift"; they were merely
*set at liberty." " To be sure, they would not be well off; they would have to beg their
Way or something, of that sort." Report on Children, in Manufacturies, 1816 (Peel's Com-
mittee, *&£}, cit y. L. & H. Hammond, The Town Labourer, * 4