Factory life during the earlier half of the nineteenth century has been the subject of countless treatises, and attention has frequently been drawn to the practice of employing children of all ages under circumstances that were almost always unhealthy and often cruel,[364] to the habit of prolonging the working day indefinitely, to the inadequate wages paid, to the general ignorance and coarseness of the workers, as well as to the deformities and vices which resulted under such unnatural conditions. In England, medical reports, House of Commons inquiries, and the speeches and publications of Owen aroused the indignation of the public, and in 1819 an Act of Parliament was passed limiting the hours of work of children in cotton factories. This, the first rudiment of factory legislation, was to be considerably extended during the course of the century. J. B. Say, who in 1815 was travelling in England, declared that a worker with a family, despite efforts often of an heroic character, could not gain more than three-quarters and sometimes only a half of what was needed for his upkeep.[365] In France we must wait until 1840 to find in the great work of Dr. Villermé a complete description of the heartrending life of the workers and the martyrdom of their children. Here, for example, we learn that “in some establishments in Normandy the thong used for the punishment of children in the spinner’s trade appears as an instrument of production.”[366] Even before this, in an inquiry into the state of the cotton industry in 1828, the Mulhouse masters expressed their belief that the growing generation was gradually becoming enervated under the influence of the exhaustive toil of a day of thirteen or fifteen hours.[367] The _Bulletin_ of the Industrial Society of Mulhouse of the same year states that in Alsace, among other places, the general working day averaged from fifteen to sixteen hours, and sometimes extended even to seventeen hours.[368] And all evidence goes to show that things were equally bad, if not worse, in other industrial towns.[369]