At that period all the spinning and weaving of the country was domestic, the spinning being carried on in farmhouses and scattered cottages in rural places by the mothers and daughters of the families, and the weaving by men working in their own homes in towns and villages. This peaceful state of things did not last beyond the beginning of the present century. The "spinning-jenny" and "power-loom" were invented, and changes occurred. Large buildings were now needed to carry on the work, and mills and factories sprang up beside the streams of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Lancashire, these places being chosen because water was required to turn the new machinery. The water-wheel now did much of the work which had formerly needed the strong arms of men, but the small and nimble fingers of children were henceforth called into play, as they were found to be specially fitted for much of that which remained to be done by hand. Thus it came about that children's labour, in consequence of its greater cheapness, was substituted for that of grown people. In order to get a sufficient supply of children, which the scanty population near the mills could not afford, manufacturers applied to the managers of the workhouses in London and other large towns, for pauper children to be taken as apprentices. Hundreds, it is said even thousands, of children were thus taken away from even the slight protection which the tender mercies of the workhouse authorities of that day might afford, and placed entirely in the power of the master manufacturer, or, worse still, of his overseer. The evils that resulted from this apprenticeship system resembled those springing from slavery. One writer[13] says:-- "There is abundant evidence on record, and preserved in the recollection of some who still live, to show that, in many of the manufacturing districts, cruelties the most heartrending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the care of the master manufacturers; that they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour, that they were flogged, fettered, and tortured to the most exquisite refinements of cruelty; that they were in many cases starved to the bone whilst flogged to their work; and that, in some instances, they were driven to commit suicide to evade the cruelties of a world where, though born into it so recently, their happiest moments had been passed in the garb and in the coercion of a workhouse. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture and of many a murder." The Legislature interfered, and in 1802 passed an Act for regulating factories and protecting the apprentices employed in them. This Act was brought in and carried by Sir Robert Peel, the father of the statesman who repealed the Corn Laws, and himself a large manufacturer.