Conditions continued to become worse instead of better, children of both sexes being beaten and overworked to make profit for the rich capitalists until 1830, when Richard Oastler, who had led in the fight against black slavery, had his attention called to the conditions under which the children of England were practically enslaved.[453] Oastler was talking one night about his slavery reforms to a friend near Bradford and the remark was made to him: “I wonder you never turned your attention to the factory.” “Why should I?” replied the young abolitionist, “I have nothing to do with factories.” “Perhaps not,” was the answer, “but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in the West Indies and I assure you that there are cruelties practised in our mills on little children which I am sure if you knew you would try to prevent.” The man who gave this suggestion, John Wood, was himself an owner of a mill and he admitted to Oastler that in his own mill the little children were worked from six in the morning until seven at night with a break of only forty minutes for lunch and that various devices, including beatings with sticks and straps and clubs, were employed to goad them on to renewed labour. The very next day Oastler began a crusade which lasted for many weary years. He succeeded in interesting J. Hobhouse and M. T. Sadler, both members of the House of Commons, and the ten hours agitation began in and out of Parliament. In the course of a speech delivered in March, 1832, in favour of the ten hours bill, Sadler declared that so great was the demand in some districts for children’s labour that “an indispensable condition of marriage among the working classes was the certainty of offspring whose wages, beginning at six years old, might keep their inhuman fathers and mothers in idleness.” “Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible,” exclaimed Sadler, “posterity will not believe it true—that a generation of Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would work lisping infancy a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded.” But, to the nation’s eternal disgrace, that generation of Englishmen did exist, and Mr. Sadler told the House, detail by detail, of the evils and outrages of the whole abominable system. Excessive hours, low wages, immorality, ill-health—all were enumerated, and then he continued: