The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century was sudden and violent. All the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright, and Boulton were made within twenty years, steam was applied to the new looms, and the modern factory system had fairly begun.[449] With the demand for labourers and the fact that the division of labour brought about a call for low-priced workmen, some of the divisions really necessitating no greater intelligence than that of a child, the children were in great demand. It was here that the Statute of Artificers assisted in the crushing industrial conditions, for the overseers of the poor became the agents of the mill-owners and arranged for days when the pauper children could be inspected and selected for the factory work. When the selections had been made, the children were conveyed by canal boats and wagons to the destination, and then their slavery began. Sometimes men who made a business of trafficking in children would transfer them to a factory district where they were kept in a dark cellar until the mill-owner, in want of hands, came to look them over and pick out those that he thought would be useful. Nominally the children were apprentices, but actually they were slaves and their treatment was most inhuman. The parish authorities, in order to get rid of the imbeciles, often bargained that the mill-owners take one idiot with every twenty children. What became of the idiots after they had passed into the hands of the capitalist is not known, but in most cases they did not last long and mysteriously disappeared. No matter what the conditions and no matter how ill the children, they were worked without any visible vestige of human feeling. Even as late as 1840 in the evidence given before the Select Committee investigating the conditions of factories after the passage of the Reform Act of 1833, these were the conditions that the inspectors reported: Q. “Have you many lace-mills in your district?” A. “I have about thirty mills.” Q. “What are the usual hours of work in these mills?” A. “The usual hours are, about Nottingham, _twenty hours a day_, being from four o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night; about Chesterfield, the report I have had from the superintendent is, that they work twenty-four hours, all through the night, in several mills there.” Q. “Are there many children and young persons in those mills?” A. “The proportion is less in lace-mills than in others, but it is necessary to have some of them; the process of winding and preparing the bobbins and carriages requires children; those that I saw so employed were _from ten to fifteen years of age_.” Q. “Are the children detained in the mills during a considerable period of the day and night?”