THE FLAWS OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM.
THE embarrassments for the legislator which are presented by the actual state of the factory question can be distinctly traced to a redundancy of interference by law—to the accumulation of laws devised to compensate the effect of previous laws, until na- tural justice and natural motives are neutralized, nullified, and lost in a maze of factitious compulsions. And as those compul- sions have in them but little principle of vitality or self-regula- tion, each new one multiplies the mischievous effects and clamours for further interference. It would be difficult, almost impossible, to go back, unless the retraction were carried very far indeed— far beyond the latest stage of interference. To repeal the Fac- tory Act and its Ten-hour provisions, would but restore a state of things so bad as to necessitate some new interference. The oppo- nents of the Ten-hours Bill used to cry out, with a side-appeal to free trade, "Leave us alone "; but they had not been left alone. You might repeal statute after statute, as you peel coat after coat off an onion, before arriving at naked nonintervention. And as each intervention originated in a bias, at each stage you have had to compensate the ill-adjustment of the balance by some med- dling in the opposite direction. In the narrow, empirical, or purely " practical" view, the regard has always been limited to the evil last manifested, without regard to the system as a whole. There can, then, be no escape from the multiplying maze of em- barrassments, except by revising the state of the whole system ; not indeed for the object of artificially reconstructing the factory system itself, but in order to review the whole state of the laws that bear upon it. The purist of political economy will say that it is a question of " population " : the factory districts have been the scene of the most "improvident marriages "; the supply of labour exceeds the demand, and wages are low ; hence distress and difficulty, which we only increase by interference. But repeal the Factory Act, and you do not abolish intervention : on the contrary, the new Poor-law, so much favoured of political economists, was accom- panied by "home migration," which introduced to the factory districts more souls, and souls too of the most procreant kinds. This evil might suggest a counter-remedy, which would be more effective in relieving the pressure on the factory districts than any direct intervention : there has already been a regurgitation of people from the factory districts into the rural districts, and a skilfully-promoted colonization, applied chiefly to the agricultural districts, would at once stimulate that regurgitation and counter- act its most mischievous effects. The home migration had an influence in multiplying the de- rangements beyond what has been calculated. Its professed ob- ject was to equalize wages between the manufacturing and the rural districts : it remarkably failed of that effect : the re- gurgitation took place before there had been any real levelling of wages in their mean rate. But the tendency towards equalization has produced evident mischiefs. The high wages of the factory districts had one seriously beneficial consequence. The general tendency of that complicated congeries of people, machinery, aud goods, of necessities and arrangements, called " the factory sys- tem," had been, to collect workpeople into large masses, to set them at employments which formed part of immense operations, and thus to obliterate individuality of action. Although more in- telligent, by mutual communication, than the inhabitants of the rural districts, those of the factory districts were less capable of individual choice. They might work or starve : if they consented to work, it must be at the cost of merging self into the vast" sys- tem." The laws of master and servant favour the employer : his trespass is the subject of civil action ; the workman who ab- ruptly leaves his work is liable to a criminal process : it is not the simple enforcement of contract, but the penalty for correlative trespass is unequal. The consequence was to render the herded workpeople still more helpless. The same consequence was en- couraged by the penal operation of the Poor-law upon desti- tution. The law of master and servant was administered by millowners as Magistrates, the Poor-law by millowners as ex- officio Guardians. The workpeople were intensely conscious of their helplessness : with senses, feelings, passions, they were re- duced to the condition of cog-wheels in an endless series ; one mill- owner, like a single steam-engine, driving the whole machinery. It is a mockery to say that the workman could make his own bargain—he must fall into the system, or starve. He could not at his option contract to sell ten hours of his labour a day, but must work the twelve whether he would or not. But though his free action was destroyed, his senses, feelings, and passions were not : he felt his choice though he could not exercise it ; he sighed for life, though he had but his choice of death or a nightmare life in death. The helplessness of the herd only exasperated it the more. With individualism destroyed, the sole resource was tumultuary agitation. Unable to bargain for an individual ten- hours contract, the workman was debarred from attempting that bargain except through a Ten-hours Bill for the whole herd. In this way the helplessness of the workman became a source of embarrassment to the millowner and to the legislator : prevented from regulating his conduct according to circumstances, the workman acts through the herd and forces a correlative helpless- ness on the millowner.
We may look yet further. For instance, we may interrogate the law of credit, and ask how far, by "protecting" the opera- tions of the capitalist, it has factitiously built up the enormous masses of capital which give such momentum to all the oscilla- tions of trade, produce overtrading, and concentrate enormous masses of population in particular districts. We have scarcely a law that does not overdo its professed purpose; scarcely one of which the professed purpose does not overdo the necessity and expediency of the case ; although, on the other hand, we have scarcely one that does not fail through defects of construction. The result is a chaotic mass of supererogations and partial coun- teractions. Such is the state of the credit-law with its unwieldy accumulations of capital, partly false, but not the less dangerous to the capitalist and oppressive to the workman ; with its turbulent factory districts, its overtrading, its multiplied bankruptcies, its social insolvency. Our capitalists have taken powers that op- press themselves ; they have evoked correlative antagonisms, to quell which, as in 1849 or 1848, "the military are called out." To undo the Ten-hours Bill, then, would not be to attain a place of final balance and rest : if it is undoing you desire, you must go further back ; if intervention, you must apply it to re- mote and overruling causes, rather than in topical remedies for proximate causes or superficial symptoms. Of this kind, the most promising counteractive influences are—whatever promise relief of the population, augment the amount of food in the country, and elevate the moral tone by education or art.
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