The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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530 LAISSEZ FAIRE A.D. 1776 of the indentures were properly complied with. Apprentice- —1850. ; : ship had always been regarded not merely as a period of ut because SETVice, but as an opportunity of training in conduct. The thes . . Y hrerint public mind had been uneasy about the treatment of other OE parish apprentices’, but the number of the cotton factories concentrated in Manchester led to the demands for special regulations for those who were bound to this particular trade’. Sir Robert Peel, who felt the need of more effective regulations than he had been able to give in his own factory®, took the matter up, and a measure was passed in 1802, for the protection of apprentices in cotton and other factories. The Act* insists that the interior of the mills should be whitewashed twice a year, and that they should be properly ventilated ; it enacts that the apprentices shall be provided with proper clothing by their masters ; it forbids work for more than twelve hours, and prohibits night work—with a tempo- rary exception for large mills; it provides that the apprentices shall receive elementary education and religious instruction. and lays down rules as to their sleeping accommodation. The measure appears to have been almost inoperative®; it probably led the mill-owners to engage children to work persons receiving parochial aid, and to compel them, when children are wanting, utterly regardless of education, health or inclination to deliver up their offspring, or by cutting off the parish allowance leave them to perish for want!” John Brown, Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, p. 29. A writer on the workhouses of Great Britain in 1732 complains of “a very bad Practice in Parish Officers who to save Expense, are apt to ruin children by putting them out as early as they can, to any sorry masters that will take them, without any concern for their Education or Welfare, on account of the little Money that is given with them.” Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit. 6. 1 Jonas Hanway had called attention to the frightful mortality among parish infants (Letters on the importance of the rising generation (1777), 1. 27) and to the condition of the chimney sweeps. For other references see Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit. 6, 14. 2 Compare the resolutions of the Manchester Board of Health (1796) quoted by Sir Robert Peel. Minutes of evidence on Children employed in Manufactories, in Reports, 1816, mm. 877, printed pag. 139. 8 Ib. 3877. ¢ 42 Geo. III. ¢. 78, An Act for the preservation of the health and morals of parish apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills. & Sir Robert Peel seems to have thought that it had had beneficial effects at the time it was passed (Beports, 1816, mm. 378, printed pag. 140), but it is difficult to believe that the Act caused any considerable change in the mills generally. Even when the parish authorities were moved to interfere, no obvious improve- ment resulted. It is probable that * the atrocious treatment experienced by the thousands and tens of thousands of orphan children, poured forth from our

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