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