finally, it would ensure them—at least up to the age of 13—the opportunity of receiving the elements of education, and would put an end to that utter ignorance … so faithfully exhibited in the Reports of our Assistant Commissioners, and which cannot be regarded without the deepest pain, and a profound sense of national degradation.”[1]
The Tory Cabinet announced in the speech from the Throne, on February 5, 1867, that it had formulated the recommendations[2] of the Industrial Commission of Inquiry in “Bills.” A new experiment of 20 years’ duration at the expense of the working class had been necessary to accomplish so much. As early as 1840, a Commission of Parliament had been appointed to inquire into the conditions of child labor. Its report, as Senior remarks, disclosed “the most frightful picture of avarice, selfishness and cruelty on the part of masters and of parents, and of juvenile and infantile misery, degradation and destruction ever presented.… It may be supposed that it describes the horrors of a past age. But, there is unhappily evidence that those horrors continue as intense as they were. A pamphlet published by Hardwicke about 2 years ago states that the abuses complained of in 1842, are in full bloom at the present day. It is a strange proof of the general neglect of the morals and health of the children of the working class, that this report lay unnoticed for 20 years, during which the children, ‘bred up without the remotest sign of comprehension as to what is meant by the term morals, who had neither knowledge, nor religion, nor natural affection,’ were allowed to become the parents of the present generation.”[3]
The social conditions having undergone a change, Parliament could not venture to shelve the demands of the Com-
- ↑ l. c., p. xxv. n. 169.
- ↑ The Factory Acts Extension Act was passed on August 12, 1867. It regulated all metal foundries, forges, and manufactures, including machine shops, furthermore glass, paper, gutta-percha, caoutchouc, tobacco manufactures, printing shops, book binderies, and finally all workshops employing more than 50 persons.—The Hours of Labor Regulation Act was passed on August 17, 1867, and regulates the smaller workshops and the so-called house work.—I revert to these laws, and to the new Mining Act of 1872 in volume II.
- ↑ Senior, Social Science Congress, pp. 55-58.
