Arkwright’s inventions, as we have seen, took manufactures out of the cottages and farm houses of England and assembled them in factories. Thousands of hands were suddenly required especially in Lancashire, which until then was comparatively thinly populated. A great migration of population from the rural districts to the manufacturing towns was set in motion, thousands of families leaving the quiet life of the country for the intenser life of the city, but still the new demand for labor was unsatisfied. The custom sprang up of procuring apprentices from the parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere; and many thousand children between the ages of seven and fourteen years were thus sent to swell the numbers of the laboring population. Beside the factories stood apprentice houses in which the children were lodged and fed; and it was also the custom for the master manufacturer to furnish the apprentice with clothes. The work required of the children was exacting. The pay of the overseers was fixed in proportion to the work produced, a circumstance which bore hard on the apprentices. The greatest cruelties were practiced to spur the children to excessive labor; they were flogged, fettered, and in many cases they were starved and some were driven to commit suicide. We have it on the authority of Mr. John Fielding, himself, a master manufacturer and member of Parliament for Oldham, that the happiest moments in the lives of many of these children were those passed in the workhouse. The profits of manufacturing were enormous and so was the greed of the newborn manufacturing aristocracy. Night work was begun, the day shift going to sleep in the same beds that the night shift had just quitted, so that it was a common saying in Lancashire that the beds never got cold. Although the master manufacturers were unmoved by the dictates of humanity, they were not proof against the malignant fevers which broke out in the congested districts and spread their ravages throughout the manufacturing towns. Public opinion was soon aroused which led to the institution in Manchester of a board of health which in the year 1796 made an interesting report. It appeared that the children and others working in the cotton factories were peculiarly disposed to the contagion of fever; and that large factories were generally injurious to those employed in them even when no particular disease prevailed, not only on account of the close confinement and the debilitating effect of the hot and impure air, but on account of the untimely labor of the night and the protracted hours of the working day.