John Fielden on the need for Factory Reform, 1836
(John Fielden (1784-1849), a cotton manufacturer at Todmorton and Radical MP for
Oldham, was a strong supporter of the factory reform movement. John Fielden. The
Curse of the Factory System; or a short account of the origin of factory cruelties; of the
attempts to protect the children by law; of their present sufferings; our duty towards
them; injustice of Mr. Thomson's bill; the folly of the Political Economists; a warning
against sending the children of the South into the factories of the North, 1836, pp. iii-iv,
17-18,24,31-2, 35, 61; in J. T. Ward, ed., The Factory System, Vol..II, Birth and Growth
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 120-24.)
When I consented to become a Member of Parliament, it was not with a view of joining
party men or aiding in party movements; but, in order to assist, by my role, in doing such
things as I thought would benefit the labouring people as well on the land as in the
factory and at the loom. I have, all my years of manhood, been a Radical Reformer,
because I thought Reform would give the people a power in the House of Commons that
would secure to them that better condition of which they are worthy.
There is no natural cause for our distresses. We have fertile land, the finest herds
and flocks in the world, and the most skilful husbandmen; we have fine rivers and ports,
and shipping unequalled; and our ingenuity and industry have given us manufactures
which ought to complete these blessings. I am a manufacturer; but I am not one of those
who think it time we had dispensed with the land. I think that these interests are all
conducive to the prosperity of the nation; that all must go together, and that the ruin of
either will leave the others comparatively insecure.
But, with all our means of prosperity, and, if we believe the high authority which
reminds us of it every session of Parliament, with all the prosperity that we have, I cannot
believe it necessary that the manufacturers should work their labourers in the manner that
they do. The proposition, therefore, of my Lord Ashly, to diminish the excessive labour
of those who work in factories, is one for which I cordially thank him, and in which he
shall have my support. I know it to be one of bare justice and humanity. I have long
thought it, and have aided those who were more active than myself in attempts to obtain
it. I am concerned in a very large business myself, and as my manufacture, my home
trade and my export trade, is almost exclusively of that sort in which the Americans
attempt to compete with us, I must be one of the first to be ruined, if foreign competition
is to ruin it.
The object of the following pages is to show that the workpeople have been and
are cruelly treated; that they have not idly asked for protection, but that humanity and
justice require it; that we shall do ourselves no harm by granting it to them; but always
avowing, that I would cast manufactures to the winds, rather than see the workpeople
enslaved, maimed, vitiated, and broken in constitution and in heart, as these pages will
but too amply prove they now are.
JOHN FIELDEN
London, 17th May, 1836
. . . [In 1833 the Government] were in this dilemma: the Committees had always
discovered the same cruelties in practice; the same overworking, and the same horrifying
results ... They could not refuse to protect the children. But they are 'political
economists'; and though, as men, they could no longer screw up their minds and hearts so
far as to sacrifice any more limbs and lives of infants, the science would not suffer them
to invade the 'freedom of industry', by involving the adult in that protection which they
were obliged to give to the child. It is this absurd attempt to separate the adult from the
child in its labour, that has rendered every Act that has ever been passed to give
protection to children, almost void; and it is only by forcing the masters to obey this Act
now in existence, that will bring them, and after them the Government, to yield to the
really practicable and salutary measure that the whole of the factory labourers require at
their hands. [The Inspectors] . . . amuse themselves in writing up to the Government,
suggestions, that a short Act may be passed to carry us back not to the time proposed by
Lord Ashley, but to that of Sir John Hobhouse's Act.
... The Ministers stand, therefore, in this position: they threw out Lord ASHLEY's
Ten-hour Bill, because Commissioners of their own told them it did not give protection
to children, whose labour ought to be restricted to eight hours. Then, as their Eight-hour
Act will not work pleasantly, upon the advice of their Inspectors, they want to drive us
back to twelve hours, because that is adequate protection!
But, we, who contend for a Ten-hour Bill, are now just where we were when the
Ministry began to dabble officiously in affairs which it did not understand....
I well remember being set to work in my father's mill when I was little more than
ten years old; my associates, too, in the labour and in recreation are fresh in my memory.
Only a few of them are now alive; some dying very young, others living to become men
and women; but many of those who live have died off before they attained the age of
fifty years, having the appearance of being much older, a premature appearance of age
which I verily believe was caused by the nature of the employment in which they had
been brought up. For several years after I began to work in the mill, the hours of labour
in our works did not exceed ten in the day, winter and summer, and even with the labour
of those hours, I shall never forget the fatigue I often felt before the day ended, and the
anxiety of us all to be relieved from the unvarying and irksome toil we had gone through
before we could obtain relief by such play and amusements as we resorted to when
liberated from our work. I allude to this fact, because it is not uncommon for persons to
infer that, because the children who work in factories are seen to play like other children
when they have time to do so, the labour is, therefore, light, and does not fatigue them.
The reverse of this conclusion I know to be the truth. I know the effect which ten hours'
labour had upon myself; I who had the attention of parents better able than those of my
companions to allow me extraordinary occasional indulgence. And he knows very little
of human nature, who does not know that, to a child, diversion is so essential, that it will
undergo even exhaustion in its amusements. I protest, therefore, against the reasoning
that, because a child is not brought so low in spirit as to be incapable of enjoying the
diversions of a child, it is not worked to the utmost that its feeble frame and constitution
will bear ...
... But the overworking does not apply to children only; the adults are also
overworked. The increased speed given to machinery within the last thirty years, has, in
very many instances, doubled the labour of both ...
... We have nothing to fear from foreign competition. It is the greatest humbug
that Englishmen were ever made to believe in; but from competition amongst ourselves
we have everything to fear; and if we do not restrain ourselves in time, or the legislature
do not restrain us, we shall very soon destroy ourselves ...