But perhaps the worst of all the results of the new regime was the destruction of the personal relations which had hitherto existed between the employers and their employees. No attention was paid to the interests of the latter. The personal relation was forever gone, and only a hard, cold cash nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarming rate, as might be expected; the housing conditions became simply inhuman. Now it was discovered that a child at one of the new looms could do more than a dozen men had done under the old conditions, and a tremendous demand for child workers was the result. At first, as H. de B. Gibbins[13] tells us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of parents to sending their children into the factories. It was, in fact, considered a disgrace to do so. The term "factory girl" was an insulting epithet, and it was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a factory to obtain other employment. She could not look forward to marriage with any but the very lowest of men, so degrading was factory employment considered to be. But the manufacturers had to get children somehow, and they got them. They got them from the workhouses. Pretending that they were going to apprentice them to a trade, they arranged with the overseers of the poor regular days for the inspection of these workhouse children. Those chosen were conveyed to their destination, packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that moment were doomed to the most awful form of slavery. "Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer," says Gibbins,[14] "and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night."