Only gradually was

wrote impassioned invectives against the new régime. the true method of reform for the evils of the factory system seen to lie in factory legislation and in the organization of labor. Gradually the evil conditions produced by the factory system brought, at least in part, their own corrective, and the creation, through production on a large scale, of a separate working class with separate working class ideals formed the origin and basis of trade unionism as it exists to-day.

Centuries before the advent of the modern trade union, there had existed certain trade organizations called guilds. These guilds, however, while in some respects similar to trade unions, differed from the modern labor organization as fundamentally as the ancient slave or medieval serf differs from the modern workingman. The guilds were composed not only of workmen, but of masters, and these latter usually exercised control over the organization. In the days of the guilds, the division of society was not one of journeymen against masters within the trade-because the journeyman expected in course of time to become a master himself-but rather of one guild or trade against another. The guilds were semi-public bodies with the power of government within the trade and often partaking in the government of the city itself. The old guilds could be better likened to organizations composed of employers and workingmen, and even the public itself, than to an association of workmen alone. Guilds had benefit features, as have many of our modern trade unions, and, like them, fostered a fraternal spirit among the workmen. Furthermore, they regulated wages, the hours of labor, the character and excellence of the work, the number of apprentices, and other conditions of trade, thus resembling in at least some respects the trade union of to-day. The modern labor organization, however, differs from the guild, in that it is a union of workingmen banded together not primarily in the interests of the masters of the trade, but in their own interests, and in the further fact that the workingmen so united are likely to remain workingmen for the rest of their lives. It is not believed by men who have studied this question that the trade unions which sprang up in the eighteenth century and began to flourish extensively in the

nineteenth had any direct historical connection with the old guilds, and the history of the guilds is chiefly interesting as showing that at all times some form of organization has been deemed necessary by workingmen. The character of the organization, however, has changed fundamentally with the change in the character of industry and in the position and prospects of the workingman. Modern trade unionism must therefore be considered as a product of modern industry and as the direct offspring of the factory system.

CHAPTER IV

THE OPPRESSION OF LABOR UNDER THE FACTORY SYSTEM

Merrie England before the Factory System. Growth of Cities. Wheat Famines. Dear Bread and Low Wages. The Disappearance of the Old Handworkers. Fifteen Hours a day for Women and Children. The Parishes Sell Pauper Children to Manufacturers. Degradation of Labor. Terrible Death Rate. The Birth of the City Slum. Sickness and Plagues. The Manufacture of Cripples. Uncertainty of Work. No Room for Old Men. Immoral Tone of the Factories. Opium for Babies. No time for Childbirth. Death-dealing Machines. Deterioration of the Workingman.

THE

HE factory system gave birth in England to a rarely paralleled oppression of the working classes. It had been predicted that, were there no artificial checks upon human action, the welfare of the whole nation would be attained by allowing each individual to pursue his own interest. This policy of permitting one section of a population to seek its ends at the expense of another culminated in a state of affairs incredible but for the testimony of thousands of witnesses before the various Parliamentary investigating committees appointed during the first half of the nineteenth century. These investigations were as a blinding light suddenly cast into a deep Inferno, photographing a swarming mass of torturing fiends and tortured victims. Even after the lapse of over half a century the mind recoils with horror from the most superficial description of these conditions.

With the coming of the factory, England began to change from a country of farms and pastures to a land of manufacturing towns. During this time towns and cities, especially in the manufacturing districts of the North, grew at a rapid pace, while the farming population failed to increase in proportion. The growth of the towns meant the growth of a labor supply for the factories, and everything conspired to produce this result.

For half a century before 1760 crops had been unusually good and harvests plentiful, but the decades immediately following that date contained

a series of years of unprecedentedly short crops. Times were bad in the country districts. The yeoman, or small farming class, was gradually driven from the farm to the town. The common land for the pasture of cattle was rapidly enclosed and appropriated, and with the advent of the factory, the women of the farm were deprived of their winter earnings from spinning and weaving. The old hand weavers, who worked in their own homes and cultivated a small plot of ground, were driven out by the competition of the power loom, and these as well as the yeomen moved in droves to the towns. The grinding poverty of these newcomers did not prevent but rather accelerated the increase in population. There was "a devastating harvest of babies," doomed to a premature end in the city slum or to a living death in the rapacious factories. Taxes increased, the cost of living rose, and the real wages of workers fell, during the early years of the nineteenth century, to a point below which they had probably never before sunk during the five centuries preceding.

As

So low did wages fall that men came to believe in the idea of an iron law of wages, a cruel, immutable law, by which the pay of workmen was fixed at the lowest point compatible with mere existence. The actual conditions of the period seemed to warrant and verify the most dismal and pessimistic theories. The attitude of manufacturers under the stress of competition was that of masters toward slaves gratuitously obtained. long as a slave is a valuable commodity, costing, let us say, a thousand dollars or more, it pays his master to be as careful of him as of an ox or a horse. At the beginning of the last century, however, what were practically white slaves were delivered free of cost and in almost unlimited numbers. Frequently manufacturers, far from paying for the use of pauper children, were actually compensated for ridding the parish of them. In one case an employer contracted to take one idiot child for each twenty sane children. The ruthless waste of human life under such conditions scarce finds a parallel in the chronicles of peace.

The change from a rural to a city residence on the part of hundreds of. thousands of men was attended by widespread and acute misery. The

crowded slums of contemporaneous New York and London find their prototype in the overcrowding of the manufacturing towns of the England of that day. No one was concerned for the wellbeing of the newcomers. They lived in the smallest of dingy, filthy, foul-smelling rooms, in ill-built houses on ill-kept streets, in cellars and over open drains. In these dens, reeking with accumulations of filth, destitute of the primary conveniences and fundamental necessaries of health, families of artisans crowded under conditions destructive of morality and fatal to life itself. All ages and sexes herded together; there were as many people in a room as there was impure air to breathe. Refuse and filth littered the streets of the workingmen's quarter, which became a breeding place for the most virulent diseases. Epidemics of typhus and scarlet fever periodically ravaged these precincts and at times invaded the aristocratic portions of the towns.

The misery of the workingmen was aggravated by their numbers: The birth rate both in England and Ireland was high, and population mounted by leaps and bounds. At the same time, the change from manufacturing by hand to manufacturing by machine released a large surplus labor force, which was suddenly thrust into the labor market. The failure of the crops. the devastating effects of the Napoleonic wars, the sinews of which England was providing for all Europe, the heavy taxes, and the cruelly oppressive poor law all tended to depress the real wages of agricultural workers and to force them into the factories.

The condition of these workmen in the textile and other factories was incredibly bad. The day's work was constantly lengthened, in some cases to fourteen, sixteen, and more hours, and while not difficult, the labor was confining and nerve-wearing. There was little provision for the safety of the workman, and terrible accidents were a matter of daily occurrence in the crowded mills and factories. Periods of feverish activity, during which men were worked beyond the limit of human endurance, were succeeded by still more harassing periods of depression, when thousands of men were thrown into the street. The low wages and the long hours of toil left the workmen with desire for no healthful pleasures and unfitted them for moral