DARK SATANIC MILLS 59

termed "free" child labour and to other branches of manufacture.
But they received small encouragement from the bulk of their
well-to-do countrymen who in a stay-at-home age were not
given to trips to smoky and remotely situated factory towns
and were unable to imagine what they had not seen. The
isolation of the industrial areas before the coming of the
railways created a deep gulf between one-part of the nation and
the other. The only reforms philanthropists could smuggle on
to the Statute Book were of the most rudimentary kind, such as
the prohibition of the employment of children under nine in
cotton mills and the limitation of hours of labour for young
persons under sixteen to twelve a day. Even these were avoided
in practice. The Factories' Inquiry Commission of 1833 showed
that many manufacturers were still employing children of six
and seven and that the hours of labour were sometimes as high
as sixteen a day. Flogging was regarded as a necessary part of
the process of production. Harassed parents, with their eye on
the family budget, accepted all this as inevitable and even
desirable: many fathers acted as sub-contractors for the employ-
ment of their own children.

Nor did the reforms, such as they were, keep pace with the
growth of the system. The victims of the factory—at first only
an insignificant fraction of the population—increased by leaps
and bounds. Every year new inventions widened the scope of
machinery, offered new opportunities for growing rich and
forced more hungry craftsmen to seek employment for their
wives and children in the factory towns. What had hitherto
been a localised evil became a national one.

During the period of transition from cottage to factory
labour, the course of nature was reversed. The breadwinner was
left idle in the home, the wife and" her little ones driven by want
to the mill. In 1833 the cotton mills employed about 60,000 adult
males, 65,000 adult females, and 84,000 young persons of whom
half were boys and girls of under fourteen. By 1844, °f 420,000
operatives less than a quarter were men over eighteen and
242,000 were women and girls.

The result was appalling. A wife who worked twelve or
thirteen hours a day in a factory had no time to give to her
children who grew up, in Engels' tragic words, like wild weeds.
Put out to nurse with some half-savage creature for a few pence
a week until old enough to become wage-earners, they learnt