Child Labor and the British Industrial

Revolution
(This essay was written in 1976 but its thesis is as important today as ever, and
especially during the holiday season when the conventional view of child labor
in early industrial England finds its way into our hearts and homes through
Charles Dickens's classic "A Christmas Carol.")

Everyone agrees that in the 100 years between 1750 and 1850 there took place
in Great Britain profound economic changes. This was the age of the Industrial
Revolution, complete with a cascade of technical innovations, a vast increase in
industrial production, a renaissance of world trade, and rapid growth of urban
populations.

Where historians and other observers clash is in the interpretation of these

great changes. Were they "good" or "bad"? Did they represent improvement to
the citizens, or did these events set them back? Perhaps no other issue within
this realm has generated more intellectual heat than the one concerning the
labor of children. The enemies of freedom—of capitalism—have successfully
cast this matter as an irrefutable indictment of the capitalist system as it was
emerging in nineteenth-century Britain.

The many reports of poor working conditions and long hours of difficult toil
make harrowing reading, to be sure. William Cooke Taylor wrote at the time
about contemporary reformers who, witnessing children at work in factories,
thought to themselves, "How much more delightful would have been the gambol
of the free limbs on the hillside; the sight of the green mead with its spangles of
buttercups and daisies; the song of the bird and the humming of the bee." (1)

Of those historians who have interpreted child labor in industrial Britain as a

crime of capitalism, none have been more prominent than J. L. and Barbara
Hammond. Their many works, including Lord Shaftesbury, The Village Labourer,
The Town Labourer, and The Skilled Labourer, have been widely promoted as
"authoritative" on the issue.

The Hammonds divided the factory children into two classes: "Parish apprentice
children" and "free labour children." It is a distinction of enormous significance,
though one the authors themselves failed utterly to appreciate. Once having
made the distinction, the Hammonds proceeded to treat the two classes as
though no distinction between them existed at all. A deluge of false and
misleading conclusions about capitalism and child labor has poured forth for
years as a consequence.

Opportunity or Oppression?

"Free labour" children were those who lived at home but worked during the days
in factories at the insistence of their parents or guardians. British historian E. P.
Thompson, though generally critical of the factory system, nonetheless quite
properly conceded that "it is perfectly true that the parents not only needed
their children's earnings, but expected them to work." (2) Professor Ludwig von
Mises, the great Austrian economist, put it well when he noted that the generally
deplorable conditions extant for centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and
the low levels of productivity which created them, caused families to embrace
the new opportunities the factories represented:

It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives
from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These
women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children
were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved
them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation. (3)

Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate "free labour" children; they
could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable.
The mass exodus from the socialist Continent to increasingly capitalist,
industrial Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century strongly suggests that
people did indeed find the industrial order an attractive alternative. And no
credible evidence exists which argues that parents in these early capitalist days
were any less caring of their offspring than those of pre-capitalist times.

The situation, however, was much different for "parish apprentice" children, and
close examination reveals that it was these children on whom the critics were
focusing when they spoke of the "evils" of capitalism's Industrial Revolution.
These youngsters, it turns out, were under the direct authority and supervision
not of their parents in a free labor market, but of government officials. Most
were orphans; a few were victims of negligent parents or parents whose health
or lack of skills kept them from earning sufficient income to care for a family. All
were in the custody of ""parish authorities." As the Hammonds themselves
wrote,

. . . the first mills were placed on streams, and the necessary labour was
provided by the importation of cartloads of pauper children from the
workhouses of the big towns. London was an important source, for since the
passing of Hanway's Act in 1767 the child population in the workhouse had
enormously increased, and the parish authorities were anxious to find relief
from the burden of their maintenance . . . . To the parish authorities,
encumbered with great masses of unwanted children, the new cotton mills in
Lancashire, Derby, and Notts were a godsend. (4)

The Hammonds proceed to report the horrors of these mills with descriptions
like these: "crowded with overworked children," "hotbeds of putrid fever,"
"monotonous toil in a hell of human cruelty," and so forth. Page after page of
the Hammonds' writings—as well as those of many other anticapitalist historians
—deal in this manner with the condition of these parish apprentices. Though
consigned to the control of a government authority, these children are routinely
held up as victims of the "capitalist order."

Author Robert Hessen is one observer who has taken note of this
historiographical mischief and has urged others to acknowledge the error. The
parish apprentice children, he writes, "were sent into virtual slavery by a
government body; they were deserted or orphaned pauper children who were
legally under the custody of the poor-law officials in the parish, and who were
bound by these officials into long terms of unpaid apprenticeship in return for
bare subsistence." (5) Indeed, Hessen points out, the first Act in Britain which
applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices,
not "free labour" children.

The Role of the State

It has not been uncommon for historians, including many who lived and wrote in
the nineteenth century, to report the travails of the apprentice children without
ever realizing they were effectively indicting government, not the economic
arrangement of free exchange we call capitalism. In 1857, Alfred Kydd published
a two-volume work entitled The History of the Factory Movement. He speaks
of "living bodies caught in the iron grip of machinery in rapid motion, and
whirled in the air, bones crushed, and blood cast copiously on the floor, because
of physical exhaustion." Then, in a most revealing statement, in which he refers
to the children's "owners," Kydd declares that "The factory apprentices have
been sold (emphasis mine) by auction as `bankrupt's effects.'" (6)

A surgeon by the name of Philip Gaskell made extensive observations of the

physical condition of the manufacturing population in the 1830s. He published
his findings in a book in 1836 entitled Artisans and Machinery. The casual
reader would miss the fact that, in his revelations of ghastly conditions for
children, he was referring to the parish apprentices:

That glaring mismanagement existed in numberless instances there can be

no doubt; and that these unprotected creatures, thus thrown entirely into the
power of the manufacturer, were overworked, often badly-fed, and worse
treated. No wonder can be felt that these glaring mischiefs attracted
observation, and finally, led to the passing of the Apprentice Bill, a bill
intended to regulate these matters. (7)

The Apprentice Bill that Gaskell mentioned was passed in 1802, the first of the
much-heralded factory legislation, the very one Hessen stresses was aimed at
the abuse by the parish officials. It remains that capitalism is not a system of
compulsion. The lack of physical force, in fact, is what distinguishes it from
pre-capitalist, feudal times. When feudalism reigned, men, women, and children
were indeed "sold" at auction, forced to work long hours at arduous manual
labor, and compelled to toil under whatever conditions and for whatever
compensation pleased their masters. This was the system of serfdom, and the
deplorable system of parish apprenticeship was a remnant of Britain's feudal
past.

The emergence of capitalism was sparked by a desire of Englishmen to rid

themselves of coercive economic arrangements. The free laborer increasingly
supplanted the serf as capitalism blossomed. It is a gross and most unfortunate
distortion of history for anyone to contend that capitalism or its industrialization
was to blame for the agony of the apprentice children.

Though it is inaccurate to judge capitalism guilty of the sins of parish

apprenticeship, it would also be inaccurate to assume that free labor children
worked under ideal conditions in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. By
today's standards, their situation was clearly bad. Such capitalist achievements
as air conditioning and high levels of productivity would, in time, substantially
ameliorate it, however. The evidence in favor of capitalism is thus compellingly
suggestive: From 1750 to 1850, when the population of Great Britain nearly
tripled, the virtually exclusive choice of those flocking to the country for jobs
was to work for private capitalists.

A discussion of child labor in Britain would be incomplete without some

reference to the famous Sadler Report. Written by a member of Parliament in
1832 and filled with stories of brutality, degradation, and oppression against
factory workers of all ages and status, it became the bible for indignant
reformers well into the twentieth century. The Hammonds described it as "one
of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of factory life at the
time. Its pages bring before the reader in vivid form of dialogue the kind of life
that was led by the victims of the new system." (8) Two other historians, B. L.
Hutchins and A. Harrison, describe it as "one of the most valuable collections of
evidence on industrial conditions that we possess." (9)

W. H. Hutt, in his essay, "The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century,"
reveals that bad as things were, they were never nearly as bad as the Sadler
Report would have one believe. Sadler, it turns out, had been agitating for
passage of the Ten Hours' Bill and in doing so he employed every cheap political
trick in the book, including the falsification of evidence. (10) The report was
part of those tactics.

Hutt quotes R. H. Greg (author of The Factory Question, 1837), who accused
Sadler of giving to the world "such a mass of ex-parte statements, and of gross
falsehoods and calumnies.as probably never before found their way into any
public document." (11)

This view is shared by no less an anticapitalist than Friedrich Engels, partner of

Karl Marx. In his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels
says this of the Sadler Report:

This is a very partisan document, which was drawn up entirely by enemies of

the factory system for purely political purposes. Sadler was led astray by his
passionate sympathies into making assertions of a most misleading and
erroneous kind. He asked witnesses questions in such a way as to elicit
answers which, although correct, nevertheless were stated in such a form as
to give a wholly false impression. (12)

As already explained, the first of the factory legislation was an act of mercy for
the enslaved apprentice children. Successive acts between 1819 and 1846,
however, placed greater and greater restrictions on the employment of free
labor children. Were they necessary to correct alleged "evils of
industrializaton"?

The evidence strongly suggests that whatever benefits the legislation may have
produced by preventing children from going to work (or raising the cost of
employing them) were marginal, and were outweighed by the harm the laws
actually caused. Gaskell admitted a short time after one of them had passed
that it "caused multitudes of children to be dismissed, but it has only increased
the evils it was intended to remedy, and must of necessity be repealed." (13)

Hutt believes that "in the case of children's labor, the effects (of restrictive laws)
went further than the mere loss of their work; they lost their training and,
consequently, their skill as adults." (14)

Conditions of employment and sanitation were best, as the Factory Commission

of 1833 documented, in the larger and newer factories. The owners of these
larger establishments, which were more easily and frequently subject to
visitation and scrutiny by inspectors, increasingly chose to dismiss children from
employment rather than be subjected to elaborate, arbitrary, and ever-changing
rules on how they might run a factory employing youths. The result of
legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, most of whom
needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older,
and more out-of-the-way places where sanitation, lighting, and safety were
markedly inferior. (15) Those who could not find new jobs were reduced to the
status of their counterparts a hundred years before, that is, to irregular and
grueling agricultural labor or worse—in the words of Mises—"infested the
country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes." (16)

So it is that child labor was relieved of its worst attributes not by legislative fiat,
but by the progressive march of an ever more productive, capitalist system.
Child labor was virtually eliminated when, for the first time in history, the
productivity of parents in free labor markets rose to the point that it was no
longer economically necessary for children to work in order to survive. The
emancipators and benefactors of children were not legislators or factory
inspectors, but factory owners and financiers. Their efforts and investments in
machinery led to a rise in real wages, to a growing abundance of goods at lower
prices, and to an incomparable improvement in the general standard of living.

Of all the interpretations of industrial history, it would be difficult to find one

more perverse than that which ascribes the suffering of children to capitalism
and its Industrial Revolution. The popular critique of child labor in industrial
Britain is unwarranted, misdirected propaganda. The Hammonds and others
should have focused on the activities of government, not capitalists, as the
source of the children's plight. It is a confusion that has unnecessarily taken a
heavy toll on the case for freedom and free markets. On this issue, it is long
overdue for the friends of capitalism to take the ideological and historical
offensive.

Notes

1. William Cooke Taylor, The Factory System (London, 1844), pp. 23-24.

2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:

Random House, 1964), p. 339.

3. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press, 1949), p. 615.

4. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer (New York: Augustus M.

Kelley, 1967), p. 145.

5. Robert Hessen, "The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and

Children," In Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New
American Library, 1967), p. 112.

6. Alfred Kydd, The History of the Factory Movement (New York: Burt Franklin,
n.d.), pp. 21-22.

7. Philip Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968),
p. 141.

8. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury (London: Constable, 1933), p.

16.

9. B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (New York:

Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), p. 34.

10. W. H. Hutt, "The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century," in F. A.

Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954), p. 1.

11. Ibid.

12. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York:
The Macmillan Co., 1958), p. 192.

13. Gaskell, p. 67.

14. Hutt, p. 182.

15. Hessen, p. 112.

16. Mises, p. 614.