2 " An Essay," &c. He himself relates on p. 96 A^herein the ** happiness " of the English agricultural labourer already in 1770 consisted. " Their powers are always upon the stretch, they cannot live cheaper than they do, nor work harder."
3 Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays, plays an important part in the genesis of capital.
262 Capitalist Production.
less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors...It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days." To tliis end, and for " extirpating idleness, debauchery and excess," promoting a spirit of industry, " lowering the price of labour in our manufactories, and easing the lands of the heavy burden of poor's rates," our " faithful Eckart " of capital proposes this approved device: to shut up such labourers as become dependent on public support, in a word, paupers, in " an ideal workhouse.^^ Such ideal workhouse must be made a " House of Terror," and not an asylum for the poor, " where they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work."^ In this " House of Terror," this " ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat-labour."^ Twelve working hours daily in the Ideal Workhouse, in the " House of Terror " of 1770! 63 years later, in 1833, when the English Parliament reduced the working day for children of 13 to 18, in four branches of industry to 12 full hours, the judgment day of English Industry had dawned! In 1852, when Louis Bonaparte sought to secure his position with the bourgeoisie by tampering with the legal working day, the French people cried out with one voice " the law that limits the working day to 12 hours is the one good that has remained to us of the legislation of the Republic! "^ At Ziirich the work 1 " An Essay," &c., p. 15, 41, 96, 97, 55, 57, 69.— Jacob Vanderlint, as early as 17S4, declared that the secret of the out-cry of the capitalists as to the laziness of the v/orking people was simjDly that they claimed for the same wages 6 days' labour instead of 4.
3 1. c. " The French," he says, *' laugh at our enthusiastic ideas of liberty." 1. c.p. 78.
4 *' They especially objected to work beyond the 12 hours per day, because the law which fixed those hours, is the only good which remains to them of the legislation of the Eepublic." ("Kep. of Insp. of Fact.," 31st October, 1856, p. 80.) The French Twelve hours' Bill of September 5th, 1850, a bourgeois edition of the decree of the The Working Day. 26;^ of children over 10, is limited to 12 hours; in Aargau in 186'2, the work of children between 13 and 16, was reduced from 12J to 12 hours; in Austria in 1860, for children between 14 and 16, the same reduction was made.^ " What a progress," since 1770! Macaulay would shout with exultation!
The " House of Terror " for paupers of which the capitalistic soul of 1770 only dreamed, was realized a few years later in the shape of a gigantic " Workhouse " for the industrial worker himself. It is called the Factory. And the ideal this time fades before the reality.
SECTION 6. — THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING DAY. COMPULSORY LIMITATION BY LAW OF THE WORKING TIME. THE ENGLISH FACTORY After capital had taken centuries in extending the working- day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours, ^ there followed on the birth of machinism and modern industry in the last third of Provisional Government of March 2nd, 1848, holds in all workshops without exceptions. Before this law the working day in France was without definite limit. It lasted in the factories 14, 15, or more hours. See " Des classes ouvrieres en France, pendant I'annee 1848. Par M. Blanqui." M. Blanqui the economist, not the Eevolutionist, had been entrusted by the Government with an inquiry into the condition of the work- ing class.
1 Belgium is the model bourgeois state in regard to the regulation of the working day. Lord Howard of Welden, English Plenipotentiary at Brussels, reports to the Foreign Office, May 12th, 18ti2: "M. Rogier, the minister, informed me that children's labour is limited neither by a general law nor by any local regulations; that the Government, during the last three years, intended in every session to pro- pose a bill on the subject, but always found an insuperable obstacle in the jealous opposition to any legislation in contradiction with the principle of perfect freedom of labour."
2 " It is certainly much to be regretted that any class of persons should toil 12 hours a day, which, including the time for their meals and for going to and returning from their work, amounts, in fact, to 14 of the 24 hours...Without entering into the question of health, no one one will hesitate, I think, to admit that, in a moral point of view, so entire an absorption of the time of the working classes, without intermission, from the early age of 13, and in trades not subject to restriction, much younger, must be extremely prejudicial, and is an evil greatly to be deplored...For the sake, therefore, of public morals, of bringing up an orderly population, and of giving the great body of the people a leasonable enjoyment of life, it is much to be desired that in all trades some portion of every working day should be reserved for rest and leisure." (Leonard Horner in Reports of Insp. of Fact., Dec, 1841.)
264 Capitalist Prodtidion, the 18th century, a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, of rustic simplicity in the old statutes, became so confused that an English judge, as late as 1860, needed a quite Talmudic sagacity to explain "judicially" what was day and what was night/ Capital celebrated its orgies.
As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new S37stem of production, recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began, and first in the native land of machinism, in England. For 30 years, however, the concessions conquered by the v/orkpeople were purely nominal. Parliment passed 5 Labour Laws between 1802 and 1883, but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrjdng out, for the requisite officials, &c.''
They remained a dead letter. " The fact is, that prior to the Act of 1833, young persons and children were worked all night, all day, or both ad libitum^ ^ A normal working day for modern industry only dates from the Factory Act of 1833, which included cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories. Nothing is more characteristic of the spirit of capital than the history of the English Factory Acts from 1833 The Act of 1833 declares the ordinary factory working day to be from half-past five in the morning to half-past eight in the evening, and within these limits, a period of 15 hours, it is law- ful to employ young persons (i.e., persons between 13 and 18 years 1 See "Judgment of Mr. J. H. Otwey, Belfast. Hilary Sessions, County Antrim, 2 It is very characteristic of the regime of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, that the one Factory Act passed during his reign, that of March 22nd, 1841, was never put in force. And this law only dealt with child-labour. It fixed 8 hours a day for children betwf en 8 and 12, 12 hours for children between 12 and 16, &c., with many exceptions which allow night-work even for children 8 years old. The supervision and enforcement of this law are, in a country where every mouse is under police administration, left to the good-will of the amis du commerce. Only since 1853, in one single department — the Departement du Nord — has a paid government inspector been appointed. Not less characteristic of the development of French society, generally, is the fact, that Louis Philippe's law stood solitary among the all-embracing mass of French laws, till the Revolution of 1848.
3 " Report of Insp. of Fact.," 30th April, 1860, p. 50.
The Working Day. 265 of age), at any time of the day, provided no one individual young person should work more than 12 hours in any one day, except in certain cases especially provided for. The 6th section of the Act provided: " That there shall be allowed in the course of every day not less than one and a half hours for meals to every such person restricted as hereinbefore provided." The employment of children under 9, with exceptions mentioned later, was forbidden; the work of children between 9 and 13 was limited to 8 hours a day, nis^ht work, i.e., according to this Act, work between 8.30 p.m. and 5.30 a.m., was forbidden for all persons between 9 and 18.
The law-makers were so far from wishing to trench on the freedom of capital to exploit adult labour-power, or, as they called" it, "the freedom of labour," that they created a special system in order to prevent the Factory Acts from having a consequence so outrageous.
" The great evil of the factory system as at present con- ducted," says the first report of the Central Board of the Com- mission of June 28th, 1833, " has appeared to us to be that it entails the necessity of continuing the labour of children to the utmost length of that of the adults. The only remedy for this evil, short of the limitation of the labour of adults, which would, in our opinion, create an evil greater than that which is sought to be remedied, appears to be the plan of working double sets of children."...Under the name of System of Relays, this " plan " was therefore carried out, so that, e.g., from 5.30 a.m. until 1.30 in the afternoon, one set of children between 9 and 13, and from 1.30 p.m. to 8.30 in the evening another set were " put to," &c.
In order to reward the manufacturers for having, in the most barefaced way, ignored all the Acts as to children's labour passed during the last twenty-two years, the pill was yet further gilded for them. Parliament decreed that after March 1st, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1st, 1835, no child under 12, and after March 1st, 1836, no child under 13, was to work more than eight hours in a factory. This "liberalism," so full of consideration for " capital," was the more noteworthy as, Dr. Farre, Sir A. Carlisle, Sir B. Brodie, Sir C. Bell, Mr.
266 Capitalist Production, Guthrie, &c., in a word, the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in London, had declared in their evidence before the House of Commons, that there was danger in delay. Dr. Farre expressed himself still more coarsely. " Legislation is necessary for the prevention of death, in any form in which it can be prematurely inflicted, and certainly this {i.e.y the factory method) must be viewed as a most cruel mode of inflicting it."
That same *' reformed " Parliament, which in its delicate con- sideration for the manufacturers, condemned children under 13, for years to come, to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory Hell, on the other hand, in the Emancipation Act, which also administered freedom drop by drop, forbade the planters, from the outset, to work any negro slave more than 45 hours a week.
But in no wise conciliated, capital now began a noisy agitation that went on for several years. It turned chiefly on the age of those who, under the name of children, were limited to 8 hours work, and were subject to a certain amount of compulsory education. According to capitalistic anthropology, the age of childhood ended at 10, or at the outside, at 11. The more nearly the time approached for the coming into full force of the Factory Act, the fatal year 1836, the more wildly raged the mob of manufacturers. They managed, in fact, to intimidate the government to such an extent that in 1885 it proposed to lower the limit of the age of childhood from 13 to 12. In the meantime the pressure from without grew more threatening. Courage failed the House of Commons. It refused to throw children of 13 under the Juggernaut Car of capital for more than 8 hours a day, and the Act of 1833 came into full operation. It remained unaltered until June, 1844.
In the ten years during which it regulated factory work, first in part, and then entirel}'-, the official reports of the factory inspectors teem with complaints as to the impossibility of putting the Act into force. As the law of 1833 left it optional with the lords of capital during the 15 hours, from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., to make every " young person," and " every child " begin, break off, resume, or end his 12 or 8 hours at any moment they liked, and also permitted them to assign to The Working Day. 267 different persons, different times for meals, these gentlemen soon discovered a new " system of relays," by which the labour- horses were not changed at fixed stations, but were constantly re-harnessed at changing stations. We do not pause longer on the beauty of this system, as we shall have to return to it later. But this much is clear at the first glance: that this system annulled the whole Factory Act, not only in the spirit, but in the letter. How could factory inspectors, with this complex book-keeping in respect to each individual child or young person, enforce the legally determined work time and the granting of the legal meal- times? In a great many of the factories, the old brutalities soon blossomed out again un- punished. In an interview with the Home Secretary (1844), the factory inspectors demonstrated the impossibility of any control under the newly invented relay system.^ In the mean- time, however, circumstances had greatly changed. The factory hands, especially since 1838, had made the Ten Hours' Bill their economical, as they had made the Charter their political, election-cry. Some of the manufacturers, even, who had managed their factories in conformity with the Act of 1833, overwhelmed Parliament with memorials on the immoral competition of their false brethren whom greater impudence, or more fortunate local circumstances, enabled to break the law. Moreover, however much the individual manufacturer might give the rein to liis old lust for gain, the spokesmen and political leaders of the manufacturing class ordered a change of front and of speech towards the workpeople. The}^ had entered upon the contest for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and needed the workers to help them to victory. They promised, therefore, not only a double-sized loaf of bread, but the enact- ment of the Ten Hours' Bill in the Free Trade millenium.^ Thus they still less dared to oppose a measure intended onty to make the law of 1833 a reality. Threatened in their holiest interest, the rent of land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic in- dignation against the " nefarious practices " * of their foes.
1 •' Rept. of Insp. of Fact.," 31st October, 1849, p. 6.
2 " Rept. of Insp. of Fact.," 31st October, 1848, p. 98.
3 Leonard Horner \ises the expression "nefarious practices" in his official reports. (" Report of Insp. of Fact.," 31st October, 1850, p. 7.)
2 68 Capitalist Production, This was the origin of the additional Factory Act of June 7th, 1844. It came into effect oii September 10th, 1844. It places under protection a new category of workers, viz., the .women over 18. They were placed in every respect on the same footing as the young persons, their work time limited to twelve hours, their night-labour forbidden, &;c. For the first time, legislation saw itself compelled to control directly and officially the labour of adults. In the Factory Report of 1844- 1845, it is said with irony: " No instances have come to my knowledge of adult women having expressed any regret at their rights being thus far interfered with." ^ The working time of children under 13 was reduced to 6 J, and in certain circum^ stances to 7 hours a-day.^ To get rid of the abuses of the " spurious relay-system," the law established besides others the following important regula- tions: — " That the hours of work of children and young persons shall be reckoned from the time when any child or young person shall begin to work in the morning." So that if A, e.g.y begins work at 8 in the morning, and B at 10, B's work- day must nevertheless end at the same hour as A's. " The time shall be regulated by a public clock," for example, the nearest railway clock, by which the factory clock is to be set. The occupier is to hang up a " legible " printed notice stating the hours for the beginning and ending of work and the times allowed for the several meals. Children beginning work before 12 noon may not be again employed after 1 p.m. The after- noon shift must therefore consist of other children than those employed in the morning. Of the hour and a half for meal times, " one hour thereof at the least shall be given before three of the clock in the afternoon...and at the same period of the day. No child or young person shall be employed more than five hours before 1 p.m. without an interval for meal time of at least 80 minutes. No child or young person [or female] shall be employed or allowed to remain in any room in which any manufacturing process is then [^.e., at meal times] carried on," &c.
2 The Act allows children to be employed for 10 hours if they do not work day after day, but only on alternate days. In the main, this clause remained inoperative.
The Working Day. 269 It has been seen that these minutiae, which, with military uniformity, regulate by stroke of the clock the times, limits, pauses of the work, were not at all the products of Parlia- mentary fancy. They developed gradually out of circum- stances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the State, were the result of a long struggle of classes. One of tlieir first consequences was that in practice the working day of the adult males in factories became subject to the same limitations, since in most processes of production the co-opera- tion of the children, young persons, and women is indispens- able. On the whole, therefore, during the period from 1844 to 1847, the 12 hours' working day became general and uniform in all branches of industry under the Factory Act.
The manufacturers, however, did not allow this " progress " without a compensating " retrogression." At their instigation the House of Commons reduced the minimum age for exploit- able children from 9 to 8, in order to assure that additional supply of factory children which is due to capitalists, accord- ing to divine and human iaw.^ The years 1846-47 are epoch-making in the economic history of England. The Repeal of the Corn Laws, and of the duties on cotton and other raw material; free trade proclaimed as the guiding star of legislation; in a word, the arrival of the mil- lenium. On the other hand, in the same years, the Chartist movement and the 10 hours' agitation reached their highest point. They found allies in the Tories panting for revenge. Despite the fanatical opposition of the army of perjured Free- traders, with Bright and Cobden at their head, the Ten Hours' Bill, struggled for so long, went through Parliament.
The new Factory Act of June 8th, 1847, enacted that on July 1st, 1847, there should be a preliminary shortening of the working day for "young persons" (from 18 to 18), and all females to 11 hours, but that on May 1st, 1848, there should be a definite limitation of the working day to 10 hours. In 1 '* As a reduction in their hours of work would cause a larger number (of children) to be employed, it was thouglit that the additional supply of children from 8 to 9 years of age would meet the increased demand " (I.e., p. 13).
other respects, the Act only amended and completed the Acts Capital now entered upon a preliminary campaign in order to hinder the Act from coming into full force on May 1st, 1 848. And the workers themselves, under the pretence that they had been taught by experience, were to help in the destruction of their own work. The moment was cleverly chosen. " It must be remembered, too, that there has been more than two years of great suffering (in consequence of the terrible crisis of 1846- 47) among the factory operatives, from many mills having worked short time, and many being altogether closed. A con- siderable number of the operatives must therefore be in very narrow circumstances; many, it is to be feared, in debt; so that it might fairly have been pi'esumed that at the present time they would prefer working the longer time, in order to make up for past losses, perhaps to pay off debts, or get their furniture out of pawn, or replace that sold, or to get a n^^ supply of clothes for themselves and their families."^ The manufacturers tried to aggravate the natural effect of these circumstances by a general reduction of wages by 10%. This was done, so to say, to celebrate the inauguration of the new Free Trade era. Then followed a further reduction of 8J% as soon as the working day was shortened to 11, and a reduc- tion of double that amount as soon as it was finally shortened to 10 hours. Wherever, therefore, circumstances allowed it, a reduction of wages of at least 257o took place.^ Under such favourably prepared conditions the agitation among the factory workers for the repeal of the Act of 1847 was begun. Neither lies, bribery, nor threats were spared in this attempt. But all was in vain. Concerning the half-dozen petitions in which workpeople were made to complain of " their oppression by the Act," the petitioners themselves declared under oral ex- amination, that their signatures had been extorted from them, " They felt themselves oppressed, but not exactly by the 1 " Eep. of Insp. of Fact.," 31st Oct., 1848, p. 16.
2 *' I found that men who had been getting 10s. a week, had had Is. taken off for a reduction in the rate of 10 per cent, and Is. 6d. off the remaining 9s. for the reduc- tion in time, together 2s. 6d., and notwithstanding this, many of them said they would rather work 10 hours." 1. c.
The Working Day, 271 Factory Act." ^ But if the manufacturers did not succeed in making the workpeople speak as they wished, they them- selves shrieked all the louder in press and Parliament in the name of the workpeople. They denounced the Factory Inspectors as a kind of revolutionary commissioners like those of the French National Convention ruthlessly sacrificing the unhappy factory workers to their humanitarian crotchet. This manoeuvre also failed. Factory Inspector Leonard Horner conducted in his own person, and through his sub-inspectors, many examinations of witnesses in the factories of Lancashire. About 707o of the workpeople examined declared in favour of 10 hours, a much smaller percentage in favour of 11, and an altogether insignificant minority for the old 12 hours.^ Another "friendly" dodge was to make the adult males work 12 to 15 hours, and then to blazon abroad this fact as the bdst proof of what the proletariat desired in its heart of hearts. But the "ruthless" Factory Inspector Leonard Horner was again to the fore. The majority of the "over- timers" declared: " They would much prefer working ten hours for less wages, but that they had no choice; tliat so many were out of employment (so many spinners getting very low wages by having to work as piecers, being unable to do better), that if they refused to work the longer time, others would immedi- ately get their places, so that it was a question with them of agreeing to work the long time, or of being thrown out of employment altogether." ^ The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the Ten Hours' Act came into force May 1st, 1848. But mean- while the fiasco of the Chartist party whose leaders were 1 * ' Though I signed it [the petition], I said at the time I was putting my hand to a wrong thing.' ' Then why did you put your hand to it? ' 'Because I should have been turned off if I had refused.' Whence it would appear that this petitioner felt himself ' oppressed,' but not exactly by the Factory Act." 1. c. p. 102.
2 p. 17, 1. c. In Mr. Horner's district 10,270 adult male labourers were thus examined in 101 factories. Their evidence is to be found in the appendix to the Factory Keports for the half-year ending October 1848. These examinations furnish valuable material in other connexions also.
3 1. c. See the evidence collected by Leonard Horner himself, Nos. 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93, and that collected by Sub-Inspector A., Nos. 51, 52, 58, 59, 62, 70, of the Appendix. One manufacturer, too, tells the plain truth. See No. 14, and No.
2/2 Capitalist Production.
imprisoned, and whose organisation was dismembered, had shaken the confidence of the English working class in its own strength. Soon after this the June insurrections in Paris and its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shop-keepers. Protectionists and Free-traders, government and opposition, priests and free- thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society. The working class was everywhere proclaimed, placed under a ban, under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt not only against the Ten Hours' Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some measure the " free " exploita- tion of labour-power. It was a pro-slavery rebellion in minia- ture, carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper because the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his " hands."
To understand that which follows we must remember that the Factory Acts of 1833, 1844<, and 1847 were all three in force so far as the one did not amend the other: that not one of these limited the working day of the male worker over 18, and that since 1833 the 15 hours from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. had remained the legal " day," within the limits of which at first the 12, and later the 10 hours' labour of young persons and women had to be performed under the prescribed conditions.
The manufacturers began by here and there discharging a part of, in many cases half of, the young persons and women employed by them, and then, for the adult males, restoring the almost obsolete night-work. The Ten Hours' Act, they cried, leaves no other alternative.^ Their second step dealt with the legal pauses for meals. Let us hear the Factory Inspectors. " Since the restriction of the hours of work to ten, the factory occupiers maintain, although they have not yet practically gone the whole length, The Working Day, 273