What a comment on England’s industrial supremacy—­England with her virtual monopoly of large-scale manufacture in Europe!  It must have been a puzzle, too, for the Poor Law Commissioners, who were then building workhouses in these parts for the purpose of depauperizing hand-loom weavers on the less eligibility principle.

But how was it, with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not die of starvation by the thousand?  If we enter a cotton mill we shall see why.  Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much as their parents, who were too old and too respectable to become factory hands.

By this time, perhaps, it is evening, but this matters nothing to the ‘melancholy mad engines’, which feed on water or burning coals.  The young people will still be there, with eight hours work to their credit and more to do—­’kept to work by being spoken to or by a little chastisement’.[40]

‘I have seen them fall asleep,’ said an over-looker in 1833, ’and they have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the Billy had stopped.  Put to bed with supper in their hands, they were clasping it next morning, when their parents dragged them out of bed.  Half asleep they stumbled or were carried to the mill, to begin again the ceaseless round.’

‘It keeps them out of mischief’, said the opponents of shorter hours.  Besides, the conditions were no worse than any other industries!  Factory work, however, as the doctors show, was different from work in the mines.  The heat and confinement of the mill caused precocious sexual development, whilst in the mines the result of exaggerated muscular development was to delay maturity.

In 1842 conditions are better than they were in 1833—­thanks to the factory inspectors.  There is little positive cruelty, and the sight of deformity—­enlarged ankle bones, bow legs, and knock knees, caused by excessive standing as a child—­is rare.  The problem now is one of industrial fatigue.  The children are ‘sick-tired’.

5.  The Midlands of Leicestershire, Notts, and Derbyshire are a region of red bricks and pantiles, dotted over valleys of exquisite green.  So let us leave the smoke of Lancashire and hover here for a while.  Here dwell the stocking workers or frame-work knitters—­the people who knit on frames stockings, gloves, and other articles of hosiery.  It does not look like a region of industry.  There are only a few towns, such as Nottingham, Leicester, and Loughborough; and except for a few lace factories in Nottingham, large buildings are rare.  The town knitters either work in their own homes or in shops with standings for perhaps as many as fifty frames.  In the villages the knitting is nearly all done in the cottages, opposite long low windows, or in a small out-house which might well be a fowl-house.

But in the streets of Leicester we can see ‘life’ of a sort.  We can watch the procession to the pawnbrokers.  Some of the knitters pawn their blankets for the day, and most lodge their Sunday clothing during the week.  Says a Leicester pawnbroker: