that supposing the hours of work to be from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., they fulfil the provisions of the statutes by allowing an hour before 9 a.m. and half-an-hour after 7 p.m. [for meals]. In some cases they now allow an hour, or half an hour for dinner, insisting at the same time, that they are not bound to allow any part of the hour and a half in the course of the factory working-day."^ The manufacturers maintained therefore that the scrupulously strict provisions of the Acts of 1844 with regard to meal times only gave the operatives permission to eat and drink before coming into, and after leaving the factory — Z.6., at home. And why should not the workpeople eat their dinner before 9 in the morning? The crown lawyers, how- ever, decided that the prescribed meal times " must be in the interval during the working hours, and that it will not be lawful to work for 10 hours continuously, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., without any interval."^ After these pleasant demonstrations. Capital preluded its revolt by a step which agreed with the letter of the law of 1844, and was therefore legal.
The Act of 1844 certainly prohibited the employment after 1 p.m. of such children, from 8 to 13, as had been employed before noon. But it did not regulate in any way the 6J hours' work of the children whose work- time began at 12 mid- day or later. Children of 8 might, if they began work at noon, be employed from 12 to 1, 1 hour; from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, 2 hours; from 5 to 8.80 in the evening, 8 J hours; in all, the legal 6-| hours. Or better still. In order to make tlieir work coincide with that of the adult male labourers up to 8.30 p.m., the manufacturers only had to give them no work till 2 in the afternoon; they could then keep them in the factory without intermission till 8.30 in the evening. " And it is now expressly admitted that the practice exists in England from the desire of mill-owners to have their machinery at work for more than 10 hours a-day, to keep the children at work with male adults after all the young persons and women have left, and until 8.30 p.m., if the factory -owners choose."^ Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered: ** My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, The penalty and forfeit of my bond."
In fact, according to statistics laid before the House of Com- mons on July 26th, 1850, in spite of all protests, on July 15th, 1850, 3,742 children were subjected to this " practice " in 257 factories/ Still, this was not enough. The lynx eye of Capital discovered that the Act of 1844 did not allow 5 hours' work before mid-day without a pause of at least 30 minutes for refreshment, Vjut prescribed nothing of the kind for work after mid-day. Therefore, it claimed and obtained the enjoyment not only of making children of 8 drudge without intermission from 2 to 8.80 p.m., but also of making them hunger during that time.
'* Jky, his heart, So says the bond.'"* This Shylock-clinging to the letter of the law of 1844, so far as it regulated children's labour, was but to lead up to an open revolt against the same law, so far as i't regulated the labour of " young persons and women." It will be remembered that the abolition of the " false relay system " was the chief aim and object of that law. The masters began their revolt with the simple declaration that the sections of the Act of 1844 which prohibited the ad libitum use of young persons and women in such short fractions of the day of 15 hours as the employer chose, were " comparatively harmless " so long as the work- time was fixed at 12 hours. But under the Ten Hours' Act they were a " grievous hardship."^ They informed the in- 2 The nature of capital remains the same in its develojjed as in its undeveloped form. lu the code which the influence of the slave-owners, shortly before the out- break of the American civil war, imposed on the territory of New Mexico, it is said that the labourer, in as much as the capitalist has bought his labour -ijower, "is his (the capitalist's) money." The same view was current among the Koman patricians. The money they had advanced to the plebeian debtor had been transformed vid the means of subsistence into the flesh and blood of the debtor. This " flesh and blood ' ■were, therefore, "their money." Hence, the Shylock-law of the Ten Tables. Linguet's hypothesis that the patrician creditors from time to time prepared, beyond the Tiber, banquets of debtors' flesh, may remain as undecided as that of Daumer on the Christian Eucharist.
The Working Day. 275 spec tors in the coolest manner that they shoukl place them- selves above the letter of the law, and re-introduce the old system on their own account.^ They were acting in the interests of the i-1-advised operatives themselves, " in order to be able to pay them higher wages." " This was the only possible plan by which to maintain, under the Ten Hours' Act, the industrial supremacy of Great Britain." " Perhaps it may be a little dilficult to detect irregularities under the relay system; but what of that? Is the great manufacturing interest of this country to be treated as a secondary matter in order to save some little trouble to Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors of Factories? "' All these shifts naturally were of no avail. The Factory Inspectors appealed to the Law Courts. But soon such a cloud of dust in the way of petitions from the masters overwhelmed the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that in a circular of August 5th, 1848, he recommends the inspectors not "to lay informations against mill-owners for a breach of the letter of the Act, or for employment of young persons by relays in cases in which there is no reason to believe that such young persons have been actually employed for a longer period than that sanctioned by law." Hereupon, Factory Inspector J. Stuart allowed the so-called relay system during the 15 hours of the factory day throughout Scotland, where it soon flourished again as of old. The English Factory Inspectors, on the other hand, declared that the Home Secretary had no power dictatorially to suspend the law, and continued their legal proceedings against the pro-slavery rebellion.
But what was the good of summoning the capitalists when the Courts, in this case the country magistrates — Cobbett s " Great Unpaid " — acquitted them \ In these tribunals, the masters sat in judgment on themselves. An example. One Eskrigge, cotton-spinner, of the firm of Kershaw, Leese, & Co., had laid before the Factory Inspector of his district the scheme of a relay system intended for his mill. Heceiving a refusal, he at fir«t kept quiet. A few months later, an individual named Robinson, also a cotton-spinner, and if not his Man Friday, at 1 Thus, amang others, Philanthropist Ashworthto Leonard Horner, in a d'SgustLiig Quaker letter. (Reports, &c., April, 1849, p. 4.)
276 Capitalist Production.
all events related to Eskrigge, appeared before the borough magistrates of Stockport on a charge of introducing the identi- cal plan of relays invented by Eskrigge. Four Justices sat. among them three cotton-spinners, at their head this same inevitable Eskrigge. Eskrigge acquitted Eobinson, and now was of opinion that what was right for Robinson was fair for Eskrigge. Supported by his own legal decision, he introduced the system at once into his own factory.^ Of course, the com- position of this tribunal was in itself a violation of the law.^ These judicial farces, exclaims Inspector Howell, " urgently call for a remedy — either that the law should be so altered as to be made to conform to these decisions, or that it should be administered by a less fallible tribunal, whose decisions would conform to the law...when these cases are brought forward. I long for a stipendiary magistrate."^ The Crown lawyers declared the masters' interpretation of the Act of 1848 absurd. But the Saviours of Society would not allow themselves to be turned from their purpose. Leonard Horner reports, " Having endeavoured to enforce the Act...by ten prosecutions in seven magisterial divisions, and having been supported by the magistrates in one case only...I con- sidered it useless to prosecute more for this evasion of the law. That part of the Act of 1884 which was framed for securing uni- formity in the hours of woik,...is thus no longer in force in m}^ district (Lancashire). Neither have the sub-inspectors or myself any means of satisfying ourselves, when we inspect a mill working by shifts, that the younor persons and women are not working more than 10 hours a-day...In a return of the 80th April,...of mill-owners working by shifts, the number amounts to 114, and has been for some time rapidly increasing. In general, the time of working the mill is ex- tended to 13J hours, from 6 a.m. to 7 J p.m.,...in some insta,nces it amounts to 15 hours, from 5 J a.m. to 8 J p.m."^ Already, in Decernber, 1848, Leonard Horner had a list of 65 manufacturers and 29 overlookers who unanimously declared 1 Reports, &c., for 30bh April, 1849, pp. 21, 22. Cf. like examples ibid. pp. 4, 5.
2 By I. and II. Will. IV., ch. 24, s. 10, known as Sir John Hobhouse's Factory Act, it was forbidden to any owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother of such owner, to act as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that con- c:!rned the Factory Act.
The Working Day. 277 that no system of supervision could, under this relay system, prevent enormous overwork.^ Now, the same children and 3^oung persons were shifted from the spinning-room to the weaving-room, now, during 15 hours, from one factory to another.^ How was it possible to control a system which, " under the guise of relays, is some one of the many plans for shuffling 'the hands' about in endless variety, and shifting the hours of work and of rest for different individuals through- out the day, so that you may never have one complete set of hands workinof tofj^ether in the same room at the same time."^ But altogether independently of actual overwork, this so- called relay-system was an offspring of capitalistic fantasy such as Fourier, in his humorous sketches of " Courtes Seances," has never surpassed, except that the " attractionof labour " was changed into the attraction of capital. Look, for example, at those schemes of the masters which the " respectable " press praised as models of " what a reasonable degree of care and method can accomplish." The personnel of the workpeople was sometimes divided into from 12 to 14 categories, which themselves constantly changed and rechanged their constituent parts. During the 15 hours of the factory day, capital dragged in the labourer now for 30 minutes, now for an hour, and then pushed him out again, to drag him into the factory and to thrust him out afresh, hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time, without ever losing hold of him until the full 10 hours' work was done. As on the stage, the same persons had to appear in turns in the different scenes of the different acts. But as an actor during the whole course of the play belongs to the stage, so the operatives, during 15 hours, belonged to the factory, without reckoning the time for going and coming. Thus the hours of rest were turned into hours of enforced idleness, which drove the youths to the pot-house, and the girls to the brothel. At every new trick that the capitalist, from day to day, hit upon for keep- ing his machinery going 12 or 15 hours without increasing the number of his hands, the worker had to swallow his meals now in this fragment of time, now in that. At the time of the 2/8 Capitalist Production.
10 hours' agitation, the masters cried out that the working mob petitioned in the hope of obtaining 12 hours' wages for 10 hours' work. Now they reversed the medal. They paid 10 hours' wages for 12 or 15 hours' lordship over labour-power.^ This was the gist of the matter, this the masters' interpretation of the 10 hours' law! These were the same unctuous free- traders, perspiring with the love of humanity, who for full 10 years, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation, had preached to the operatives, by a reckoning of pounds, shillings, and pence, that with free importation of corn, and with the means pos- sessed by English industry, 10 hours' labour would be quite enough to enrich the capitalists.^ This revolt of capital, after two years, was at last crowned with victory by a decision of one of the four highest Courts of Justice in England, the Court of Exchequer, which in a case brought before it on February Sth, 1850, decided that the manufacturers were certainly acting against the sense of the Act of 1844, but that this Act itself contained certain words that rendered it mean- ingless. "By this decision, the Ten Hours' Act was abolished."' A crowd of masters, who until then had been afraid of using the relay-system for young persons and women, now took it up heart and soul."* But on this apparently decisive victory of capital, followed at once a revulsion. The workpeople had hitherto offered a passive, although inflexible and unremitting resistance. They now protested in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The pretended Ten Hours' Act, was thus simple humbug, parliamentary cheating, had never existed I The Factory Inspectors urgently warned the Government that the antagonism of classes had arrived at an incredible tension. Some of the masters themselves murmured: " On account of 1 See Reports, &c,, for 30th April, 1849, p. 6, and the detailed explanation of the " shifting system," by Factory Inspectors Howell and Saunders, in "Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848.'' See also the petition to the Queen from the clergy of A.shton and vicinity, in the spring of 1849, against the "shift system."
2 Of. for example, " The Factory Question and the Ten Hours' Bill." By R. H.
3 F. Fngels: "The English Ten Hours' Bill." (In the " Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-cekonomische Revue." Edited by K. Marx. April number, 1850, p. 13.) The same " high " Court of Justice discovered, during the American Civil War, a verbal ambiguity which exactly reversed the meaning of the law against the arming of pirate ships.
The Working Day, 279 the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of thinors altocrether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire; one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its immediate neighbourhood. The manufacturer in large towns could evade the law, the manu- facturer in country districts could not find the people necessary for the relay-system, still less for the shifting of hands from one factory to another," &c. And the first birthright of capital is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists.
Under these circumstances a compromise between masters and men was effected that received the seal of Parliament in the additional Factory Act of August 5th, 1850. The working day for " young persons and women," was raised from 10 to 10 J hours for the first five days of the week, and was shortened to 1\ on the Saturday. The work was to go on between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.,^ with pauses of not less than \\ hours for meal- times, these meal-times to be allowed at one and the same time for all, and conformably to the conditions of 1844. By this an end was put to the relay-system once for all.^ For children's labour, the Act of 1844 remained in force.
One set of masters, this time as before, secured to itself special seigneurial rights over the children of the proletariat. These were the silk manufacturers. In 1833 they had howled out in threatening fashion, " if the liberty of working children of any age for 10 hours a day were taken away, it would stop their works." ^ It would be impossible for them to buy a suffi- cient number of children over 13. They extorted the privilege they desired. The pretext was shown on subsequent investiga- tion to be a deliberate lie.^ It did not, however, prevent them, during 10 years, from spinning silk 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children who had to be placed upon stools for the performance of their work.'' The Act of 1844 certainly " robbed " them of the " liberty " of employing children under 11 longer than 6 J hours a day. But it secured to them, on the other hand, the privilege of working children between 11 and 1 In winter, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. may be substituted.
2 "The presentlaw (of 1850) was a compromise whereby the employed surrendered the benefit of the Ten Hours' Act for the advantage of one uniform period for the commencement and termination of the labour of those whose labour is restricted." (Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1852, p. 14.)
Capitalist Production, 13, 10 hours a day, and of annulling in their case the education made compulsory for all other factory children. This time the pretext was "the delicate texture of the fabric in which they were employed, requiring a lightness of touch, only to be acquired by their early introduction to these factories."^ The children were slaughtered out-and-out for the sake of their delicate fingers, as in Southern Russia the horned cattle for the sake of their hide and tallow. At length, in 1850, the privilege granted in 1844 was limited to the departments of silk-twisting and silk-winding. But here, to make amends to capital bereft of its "freedom," the work time for children from 11 to 13 was raised from 10 to 10 J hours. Pretext: " Labour in silk mills was lighter than in mills for other fabrics, and less likely in other respects also to be prejudicial to health."^ Official medical inquiries proved afterwards that, on the contrary, " the average death-rate is exceedingly high in the silk districts, and amongst the female part of the population is higher even than it is in the cotton districts of Lancashire." * Despite the pro- 3 1. c, p. 27. On the whole the working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved physically. All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at different times has convinced me of it. Nevertheless, and txclusive of the terrible death-rate of children in the first years of their life, the <-»flBcial reports of Dr. Greenhow show the unfavourable health condition of the manu- facturing districts as compared with "agricultural districts of normal health." As evidence, take the following table from his 1861 report: — Percentage of Adult Males en- gaged in manufac- tures.
Death-rate from Pulmonary Affections Males.
Name of District.
Death-rate from Pulmonary Affections Females.
Percentage of Adult Females en- gaged in manufac- tures.
Kind of Female Occupation.
Wigan Cotton Blackburn Do.
Halifax Worsted Bradford Do.
Macclesfield Silk Leek Do.
Stoke-upon-Trent Earthenware "Woolstanton Eight healthy agri- Do.
cultural districts The Working Day, 281 tests of the Factory Inspector, renewed every 6 months, the mischief continues to this hour.^ The Act of 1850 changed the 15 hours* time from 6 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., into the 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for "young persons and women " only. It did not, therefore, affect children who could always be employed for half an hour before and 2 J hours after this period, provided the whole of their labour did not exceed %\ hours. Whilst the bill was under discussion, the Factory Inspectors laid before Parliament statistics of the in- famous abuses due to this anomaly. To no purpose. In the background lurked the intention of screwing up, during pros- perous years, the working day of adult males to 15 hours by the aid of the children. The experience of the three following years showed that suchan attempt must come to grief against the resistance of the adult male operatives. The Act of 1850 was therefore finally completed in 1853 by forbidding the " employ- ment of children in the morning before and in the evening after young persons and women." Henceforth with a few exceptions the Factory Act of 1850 regulated the working day of all workers in the branches of industry that come under it.^ Since the passing of the first Factory Act half a century had elapsed.^ Factory legislation for the first time went beyond its original sphere in the " Printworks' Act of 1845." The displeasure with which capital received this new "extravagance " speaks through every line of the Act. It limits the working day for children 1 It is well-known with what reluctance the English " free traders " gave up the protective duty on the silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection to English factory children now serves their turn.
2 During 1859 and 1860, the zenith years of the English cotton industry, some manu- facturers tried, by the decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives to an extension of the working day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor minders put an end to the experiment by a petition to their employers in which they say, "Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and, while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land, and that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves and future generations This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we commence work again after the Christmas and New Year's holidays, we shall work 60 hours per week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half out. " (Keports, &c., for 30th April, 8 On the means that the wording of this Act afforded for its violation cf. the Parlia- mentary Return " Factory Regulations Act " (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner's " Suggestions for amending the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal working, now become very prevalent."
202 Capitalist Production.
from 8 to 13, and for women to 16 hours, between 6 a.ra. and 10 p.m., without any legal pause for meal times. It allows males over 13 to be worked at will day and night.^ It is a Parliamentary abortion.^ However, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most character- istic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-band with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still "free."^ The Pharisees of " political economy " now proclaimed the dis- cernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working day as a characteristic new discovery of their " science."^ It will be easily understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled to the inevitable, the power of resistance of capital gradually weakened, whilst at the same time the power of attack of the working class grew with the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately interested in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid advance since 1860.
The dye-works and bleach- works all came under the Factory Act of 1850 in 1860; ' lace and stocking manufactures in 1861.
1" Children of the age of 8 years and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the last half year in my district." (Reports, &c., for 31st 2 " The Printworks' Act is admitted to be a failure, both with reference to its educa- tional and protective provisions." (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 52.)
3 Thus, e.g., E. Potter in a letter to the "Times " of March 24th, 1863. The "Times " reminded him of the manufacturers' revolt against the Ten Hours' Bill.
4 Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch, collaborator and editor of Tooke's "History of Prices." Is it a scientific advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?
5 The Act passed in 1860, determined that, in regard to dye and bleach-works, the working day should be fixed on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and defin- itely on August 1st, 1862, at 10 hours, i.e., at 10^ hours for ordinary days, and 1\ for Saturday, Now, when the fatal year, 1862, came, the old farce was repeated. Be- sides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow the employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year longer. "In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives to work 12 hours per day, and make wages when they could," A bill to this effect had been brought in, " and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers in Scotland that the bill was abandoned." (Reports, &c., for 31st October, The Working Day, 28 o In consequence of the first report of the Commission on the employment of children (18G3), the same fate was shared by the manufacturers of all earthenwares (not merely pottery), lucifer-matches, percussion-caps, cartridges, carpets, fustian- cutting, and many processes included under the name of ''finishing." In the year 1863 bleaching in the open air ^ and 1862, J). 14-15.) Thus defeated by the very work-people, in whose name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer spectacles, that the Act of 18G0, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament for the "protection of labour," in equivocal phrases, gave them a pretext to exclude from its working the calenderers and fin- ishers. English jurisprudence, ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common Pleas this piece of pettifogging. "The operatives have been greatly disappointed...they have complained of overwork, and it is greatly to be regretted that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by reason of a faulty definition." (1. c, p. 18.)
1 The " open-air bleachers " had evaded the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at it in the night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time Parliament was, by petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which bleaching in the open-air was reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying rooms were used at tempera- tures of from 00'^ to 100° Fahrenheit, in which the work was done for the most part by girls. *' Cooling" is the technical expression for their occasional escape from the dry- ing-rooms into the fresh air. "Fifteen girls in stoves. Heat from 80° to 90° for linens, and 100° and upwards for cambrics. Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a close stove. The girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries the cambrics rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands are unlimited. If busy, they work till 0 or 12 at night for successive nights." (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 56.) A medical man states: " No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature gets too high, or the workers' hands get soiled from perspiration, they are allowed to go out for a few minutes My experience, which is considerable, in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion that their sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives in a spinning factory (and Capital, in its memorials to Parliament, had painted them as floridly healthy, after the manner of Rubens). The diseases most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of uterine functions, hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism. All of these, I believe, are either directly or indirectly induced by the impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed, and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the cold, damp atmosphere, in winter, when going to their homes." (I.e. p. 56-57.) The Factory Inspectors remarl ed on the supplementary law of 1860, torn from these open-air bleachers: "The Act his not only failed to afford that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains a clause...ap- parently so worded that, unless persons are detected working after 8 o'clock at night they appear to come under no protective provisions at all, and if they do so work, the mode of proof is so doubtful that a conviction can scarcely follow." (1. c, p. 52.)