In England, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, developed the English manufacturing
system. Woman-and child-labor were common in both mines and factories.
The regular working hours were from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M., with six full
days' labor per week. One investigator remarks: "It is a very common
practice with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in
large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and
Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children are sent off by
waggon loads at a time, and are as much lost for ever to their parents
as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind
them, by procuring a settlement for the children at the end of forty
days, get rid of them for ever; and the poor children have not a human
being in the world to whom they can look up for redress against the
wrongs they may be exposed to from these wholesale dealers in them,
whose object it is to get everything they can possibly wring from their
excessive labor and fatigue."
In the mines conditions were still worse, and a report in 1842 states:
"Children are taken at the earliest ages, if only to be used as living
and waving candlesticks, or to keep rats from a dinner, and it is in
pits of the worst character, too, in which most female children are
employed. It would appear from the practical returns obtained by the
commissioner, that about one-third of the persons employed in coal mines
are under eighteen years of age, and that much more than one-third of
this proportion are under thirteen years of age." In certain mines there
was no distinction of sex so far as underground labor was concerned. The
men worked entirely naked and were assisted by females of all ages, from
girls of six years to women of twenty-one, who were quite naked down to
the waist.
But if oppression was rife, education at a low ebb, and misery
prevalent, the religion of the people was receiving attention. The
period was, in fact, one of revival in religion. The Wesleyan revival
was in full swing, and Evangelical Christianity was making great
advances. Between 1799 and 1804 there were founded, "The British and
Foreign Bible Society," "The London Missionary Society," and "The
Mission To The Jews."
When the Education Bill of 1819 came before the House of Lords, out of
eighteen Bishops who voted on the measure, fifteen voted against it!
Thus the religionists were most active during the period when a
condition approximating white slavery existed. And why should this not
have been so, when the Church is not interested in the social and
economic status of its adherents during their existence on this planet,
but is avowedly concerned with deluding its devotees into a mythical
belief in a life hereafter? The greatest number of slaves and the
greatest degradation of workers is to be found in those times and places
where religious superstition is most powerful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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