A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy: Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published. — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy: Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published.
John Stuart Mill · en
if not impossible, from the record of sufferings inflicted upon Negro
slaves, to quote instances of greater atrocity, than what I have, or am
about to develope, I should not exaggerate, nor should I be guilty of
bombast, were I to affirm, that the national character has been, and is
seriously dishonoured by that system of boundless commercial avarice, in
which these detestable crimes originated. It will continue thus shaded,
till a full and fair investigation takes place. There never yet was
a crisis, when, in the commercial world, the march of avarice was so
rapid, or its devastations so extensive upon the morals and well being of
society, as within the period embraced by this narrative; a march that
seems to acquire celerity in proportion to the increasing spread of its
malific _influence_, and to derive _impunity_ from the prodigious wealth
it accumulates in the hands of a few great and unfeeling capitalists,
at the expence of the individual happiness, health, and morals of the
million. This iniquitous system is the prolific parent of that tremendous
flood of vice, which has saturated the manufacturing populace, with the
most appalling depravity. This has reduced those many hundred thousand
weavers, to a state of destitution so extreme, as to render the condition
of the most destitute portion, incomparably worse than that of the
field-slave in the West India plantations, who has the good fortune to
belong to a humane proprietor. This baleful and wide wasting system
throws upon the crown the undeserved odium of being the cause or the
abettor of these dreadful evils, by which the poor weaver is oppressed—an
impression that has neutralized the loyalty of myriads, and fitted them
to become, in the hands of unprincipled demagogues, the source of popular
commotions, of foul and iniquitous conspiracies, of deep and radical
disloyalty. So indurated, so inveterate, is the loathing and aversion
cherished towards the executive government, in all its ramifications,
by a large portion of weavers, that it has induced multitudes wholly to
renounce, to vilify in every practicable manner, to degrade christianity!
I do not, in this declamation, indulge in light, personal, or selfish
motives; for whatever I assert, as positive matter of fact, I hold myself
morally responsible, and stand publicly pledged to substantiate my
assertion, by adducing, if requisite, not alone the authorities on which
I make them, but also to _prove_ the validity of those authorities.