A factory is an establishment where several workmen are collected together for the purpose of obtaining greater and cheaper conveniences for labour than they could procure individually at their homes; for producing results by their combined efforts, which they could not accomplish separately.... The principle of a factory is that each labourer, working separately, is controlled by some associating principle, which directs his producing powers to effecting a common result, which it is the object of all collectively to attain. Factories are therefore a result of the universal tendency to association which is inherent in our nature, and by the development of which every advance in human improvement and human happiness has been gained. Every sentence here is true; but the combined effect is not true. Taylor ingenuously omits one important fact. The "associating principle" is the employer working for his own hand, and the "common result" is that employer's profit. Marx saw that the subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of machines, and the bringing together of individuals of both sexes and all ages gave rise to a system of elaborate discipline, dividing the workers into operatives and overlookers, into "private soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army." But it is not necessary to call in the rather suspect authority of Marx. Richards, the Factory Inspector, who by no means took a sentimental view of mill work, had written quite candidly: A steam engine in the hands of an interested or avaricious master is a relentless power, to which old and young are equally bound to submit. Their position in these mills is that of thraldom; fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen hours per day, is exhausting to the strength of all, yet none dare quit the occupation, from the dread of losing work altogether. Industry is thus in bonds; unprotected children are equally bound to the same drudgery.[14] This cast-iron regularity of the factory system was felt as a terrible hardship, especially in the case of women, and often amounted to actual slavery. Wholesale accusations were brought against the factory system as being in itself immoral and a cause of depravity. Southey said of the factory children, that: The moral atmosphere wherein they live and move and have their being is as noxious to the soul, as the foul and tainted air which they inhale is to their bodily constitution.... What shall we say then of a system which ... debases all who are engaged in it?... It is a wen, a fungous excrescence from the body politic.