(FROM THE MORNING CHRONICLE.)
If any man were to say, that every year a tenth or twentieth part of the children born in this country should he taken from their parents and guardians and butchered, the proposition would be received with the utmost horror. But this would he humanity itself, compared with the practices in our manufacturing districts, condemn so many infants to unvaried misery and pain ; so that life, instead of being a blessing, is a curse to them.
This may be called a country of anomalies. We legislate to ensure the kind treatment of the inferior animals, and we have hitherto abandoned helpless infants to the most merciless treatment. We have allowed the laws prescribed by nature for the physical and moral developement of human beings to be cruelly infringed. We have consigned creatures unable to protect themselves to being as hard as the machinery they direct, and by whom the bones and sinews of these human victims are less prized than one of their rollers.
We fear it will be found that in no country can the mass of the people be deemed free agents. In thinly peopled countries, the powerful make slaves of the less powerful. In densely peopled countries, the numbers of the people force a competition which leaves them at the mercy of the rich. But whatever may be the case with adults, we say decidedly, that a nation possesses a deep interest in securing the healthy development of all the people, and that no persons, not even parents and guardians should be allowed to subject children to a degree of labour which interferes with their growth and health, and deteriorates the species. The manufacturing system in this country, has grown up in our own days. All the physiologists seem to think think that the degeneracy, which is already too visible, will greatly increase. Sir Anthony Carlisle does, indeed, seem to hold out a sort of consolation in the circumstance of the power of propagation being destroyed in our manufacturing population in the course of a few generations, so that room will be made, by the extinction of the effete races, for the constant emmigration of healthy race from the country, the persons born and bred in cities throughout Europe (he says) are naturally of less stature than those born in country places."
He supposes the population of London would become extinct in fifty years, if not refreshed by accessions from the country.
"Children (he observes) brought up from early life in warm rooms, may enjoy an apparent degree of health until almost the age of maturity, but they never obtain vigorous health ; for although they may not apparently perish in much larger numbers, compared with those who are less protected against the inclemencies of the cold and wet weather, the effects of bad food, and so forth, shall I would venture to add, that even supposing the mortality among the former were not so great as in the latter class, they would be unfit to carry on a succeeding generation of healthy and vigorous human beings; they would be either nipped in the bud about the time of puberty, or they would beget weakly, inferior children ; for there is nothing more hereditary than family tendencies, particularly tendencies engendered by such habits as are hurtful to the first formation of animal structures. The same happens again in the animal creation ; if you domesticate rabbits, and keep them in close houses for a series of generations, they deviate into morbid rarities, and eventually cease to breed ; the procreative power being one of the first animal faculties to cease with every diminution of animal health and vigour."
(FROM THE MORNING HERALD.)
If Mr. Sadler had never done any thing for society but the bringing to light this monstrous and inhuman system, society would be largely his debtor. The evil cannot long outlive its exposure. Every heart capable of a throb of sympathy, must feel for the infants who are sacrificed by hundreds to the political economy of the factories. What a picture is that which represents childhood in chains—childhood under lock and key not indulging its sportive gambols in the presence of tenderness and affection, but drudging for a brute, and trembling at a tyrant! —And yet that picture is no one of fancy. But the meeting of parliament will be the signal for putting an end to such an abomination. It must stop—it cannot go on—for the common instincts of mankind rise up in judgment against it.
(FROM THE COURIER.)
We boast of our unrivalled manufactures and of their extraordinary cheapness, but it is little known at how great a cost of infant suffering and of human life our manufacturing pre-eminence is purchased. The population of this country is in a condition of manufacturing slavery to the rest of the world. But it is not enough that our adult population are reduced to the lowest state of destitution, in order that the produce of their labour may compete with the labour of the population of less-burdened states—it is in vain that the wages of labour have been reduced so low that the wretched workmen are scarcely able to sustain the unexampled privations to which they are subjected, a new economy has been introduced into the machinery of our manufacturing system ; the machinery of children! The machinery of wood and iron costs something to put together ; something for repair; but the human machinery costs nothing to procure, and when the repair of health and strength is wanted, it may be thrown aside without loss to the employer.—The evil is in the system ; under the actual circumstances of the country, manufactures and wholesale child-murder must go on together; if manufactures must be produced at the little money cost, at which they are now produced, children must be consumed, as they are now miserably consumed in the forced production of cheap goods. Whence has arisen this necessity? Great Britain has not been wont to be celebrated for the infamous distinction of a callous indifference to the welfare of its working population; still less has this country been distinguished for a neglect of the children of the poor, who are in the truest sense of the term, the children of the State. How is it that this novel feature has become conspicuous in the aspect of our labouring poor? We must search deeper for the cause than in the natural cupidity of those engaged in trade. Were things in a natural state in this country, the cupidity of the trader would be counteracted by the the instinctive affection of the parent. There must be some powerful cause at work commensurate with the enormity of the practice of this sale of a child of tender years, by its father and its mother. The moral degradation of this English slavery, is greater on the part of the seller than the buyer. The manufacturer may be selfish, but the parent seems to be a monster. Nothing but the sternest law of the most terrible necessity could have produced such an unnatural change as this.— And it is so:—the terrible necessity of the most appalling destitution has produced this monstrous system of child machinery. The whole evil results directly from the lowness of wages, which is indirectly caused by the change in our system of currency, consummated by the Bill of 1819.
The matter is so plain that a child may understand it. The diminution of the circulating medium of the country, has made money more valuable ; that is, less money is given in exchange for any thing now than was given in exchange for it before the diminution; less money, consequently, is given in exchange for an article of manufacture ; but the manufacturer must have a certain profit on the article to make it worth his while to produce it; at any rate, he must receive as much money for it as will save him from a loss on his manufacture—but he cannot have in exchange for it so much money as he was used to have, because the whole quantity of money circulating in the country is less than it used to be—nor can the manufacturer sell his article at less than he used to sell it, for its price was already at the lowest remunerating profit. Thus while that amount of that part of the price of his manufactured article, the taxes on it, remain the same, he can get in exchange for it, but a portion of that money which before went to pay the cost of its manufacture, and the cost of its taxation. So that the taxation absorbs a much larger part of the money given in exchange for the manufactured article than used to be the case before the diminution of the currency—for though money is raised in value, the taxes do not therefore take less of it, as would be fair--they take the same number of sovereigns in nominal amount, but as money of greater value.
Well, the manufacturer feeling the change that has come over his operations, has been obliged to consider, since he cannot reduce the amount of his taxation, and cannot increase the quantity of the circulating medium to correspond with it as it did before 18I9—how can he reduce the cost of production. He finds that he can reduce it in no other way than by lowering the wages of labor. To this, in fact, he is forced. He must either cease from manufacturing or he must reduce that part of the cost of his production which consists of wages paid to the labourer.
It may be observed, that such has been the case with all trades and pursuits; agricultural as well as mechanical. Nor would it be difficult to show that the rural insurrections are effects proceeding from the same cause as that which we are now describing. But to our argument ; and to the close of our deductions. The manufacturer is irresistibly compelled to lower the wages of labor; and the labourers are by a like irresistible compulsion, the compulsion of necessity, forced to take them. These wages are inadequate to the purchase of the sustenance of the parents and their children. The children therefore, must be made to provide in part or in the whole for themselves. We are speaking of children of eight or nine years of age! The losing business of the manufacturer continues to urge him to look out for further means of reducing his cost of production. The famished child stands ready ; the natural feelings of the still more famished mother are are deadened—the last thing that fails is the instinct of natural affection—deadened from excess of habitual suffering ; the domestic slave trade of the English nation is established: and a system of child machinery furnishes horrors for a parliamentary report to excite the disgust and reprobation of astonished Europe.
Austral-Asiatic Review (Hobart Town, Tas. : 1833), Tuesday 30 July 1833, page 4
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