The Factory Controversy; a warning against meddling legislation

Front matter

THE

FACTORY CONTROVERSY;

A WARNING AGAINST

Letter

PREFATORY LETTER.

TO

HENRY WHITWORTH, Esq.,

SECRETARY TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FACTORY OCCUPIERS.

My Dear Sir,

I propose to place at the disposal of your Association an article which I wrote for the "Westminster Review," the history of which is simply this:—

In October, 1851, there appeared in the "Westminster Review" an article (or a portion of one, for the writer was carried off by cholera before he had finished his work) on the Proper Sphere and Duties of Government. This essay, on the most important of all subjects of domestic politics, impressed me deeply, carrying out solidly, as it did, some ideas which had long been floating in my mind. I felt at once, and I have felt ever since, that it would be a good public service to illustrate in all possible ways the truths of that essay.

Some weeks ago, a representation made by Mr. Horner determined me to reproduce the subject of Meddling Legis , and to take the working of the Factory Acts as my illustration, as the most complete exhibition that could be desired of the vice of the principle of Meddling Legislation, and the social mischiefs caused by its injustice and impracticableness. I did not then even know of the existence of your Association: and I mention these facts to obviate all pretext for the charge that my article was in any way instigated by any factory occupiers. What instigation there was was supplied by Mr. Horner, whose views it appeared to me highly necessary to controvert, for the sake at once of employers and employed, and indeed of all who live under the laws of England.

I mentioned my desire to obtain the facts on both sides of the question to a member of your Association who visited me soon after; and it was from Mr. Horner's Report thus obtained that I first learned the origin, date, and circumstances of your Association. What I now send you is so far from being a brief held for the Association, that it was your adversary who first put it into my head to write the article; and it was his side of the question that I read before I looked at yours.

I proposed my article to the editor of the "Westminister Review," and the proposal was accepted. From the MS., however, he started back. In regard to the doctrine, he agrees with me, he declares, entirely; but he disapproves the manner in which I have treated the sayings and doings of Mr. Horner, Mr. Dickens, and others. I, for my part, cannot conscientiously modify what I have said. These gentlemen have publicly assumed a ground which, in the opinion of sound statesmen, cannot he maintained; and I believe my article proves that they have supported their position by inaccurate statements, and in a temper and by language which convey their own condemnation. In a matter of literary judgment or taste, one may soften one's tone of criticism and opposition to the gentlest breath of dissent; but in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no compromise and no mistake. Mr. Horner and Mr. Dickens, as Inspector and Editor, have taken up a ground which they do not pretend to establish on any principle; and they hold it in an objectionable temper, and by indefensible means. It seems to me, therefore, necessary to meet them unflinchingly, and expose, with all possible plainness, the mischief they are doing. They cannot complain, with any appearance of reason, of any plainness of speech. I have judged them by their own published statements; and the language of Mr. Horner's Reports, and of Mr. Dickens's periodical, in regard to the Factory Occupiers of England, leaves them no ground of remonstrance on the score of courtesy. I like courtesy as well as anybody can do; but when vicious legislation and social oppression are upheld by men in high places, the vindication of principle and exposure of the mischief must come before considerations of private feeling. These gentlemen have offered a challenge to society,—and certainly in no spirit or tone of courtesy; and they will not, if they claim to be rational men, object to a fair encounter of their challenge. On these grounds, I declined to modify my article, preferring to publish it unaltered through some other channel. As the best means of meeting the mischief it denounces, I offer it to your Association, to be published as a pamphlet, or in any way which, in the judgment of your committee, may ensure the widest circulation for it. In my present state of health, it has been something of an effort to write this article; and if I had consulted my own ease, I should have let the matter alone altogether; but the struggle for the establishment of a good or bad principle in this vital case is so important, and the existence of your Association appears to me a social fact of such extraordinary significance, that I could not have been easy to let the occasion pass without an effort on my part, for no better reason than its occasioning me fatigue and many painful emotions.

I now see additional reason to believe that no effort on the side of sound principle can be unnecessary. What influence Mr. Oastler's "Letter" of commentary on the Special Report of your Association may have I know not; but the republication of the Factory Acts by "Thomas Tapping, Esq., Barrister-at-Law," with notes which he calls explanatory, but which to his readers appear to be rather something very different, seems to show that it was high time the passionate advocates of Meddling Legislation should be met by opponents of such legislation who are by position likely to be at once dispassionate and disinterested. What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested party, to write such a preface as Mr. Tapping's, it is difficult to imagine. On opening it, my eye falls at once on a false statement, which ought to destroy the authority of all the rest. Mr. Tapping writes (p. vi.) that "the manufacturers have instituted the 'National Association of Factory Occupiers,' the special purpose of which, it is said, is to raise a fund for defraying thereout all fines for not fencing which may be inflicted upon members. For the sake of suffering humanity it is hoped that, notwithstanding such illegal association, the inspectors will vigorously prosecute all violations of the law in this respect." This statement is dated October 2nd, 1855; whereas the Special Report of your Association, dated July, expressly declares that the Association will pay no penalties awarded under Factory Acts. Mr. Tapping tells us "it is said;" but he is not justifiable in publishing such a statement, and thereupon declaring your Association "illegal," without fully ascertaining the fact.

If the publication of my MS. should induce any considerable number of persons to inquire into the facts of the case, and investigate the principle of such special legislation as that which has singled out one class for stringent restraint, and may impose similar restraint on every other class in turn, I shall be glad that I have offered to you this spontaneous plea on behalf of your cause. I trust it can do that cause no harm, if it does no good.

I suppose, and hope, that you will print the paper just as it stands,—in the form of an article intended for a quarterly review. Not only does this seem to me the most simple and honest course, but it will ensure the reader against lapsing into a supposition that the writer is an agent or advocate of your committee, or in some way or other less independent and impartial than I really am.

I shall be not only thankful, but compelled, to turn over to you, as I should have done in due course to the editor of a review, any correspondence which may result from the publication of my article. My state of illness—worse since the paper was written—incapacitates me for correspondence; and I hope therefore, that you will kindly allow all letters on the subject to be addressed to you, as the Secretary of the "National Association of Factory Occupiers."

Believe me, Dear Sir, truly yours,

Harriet Martineau.

Note.—It is requested, in conformity with the wishes of Mrs. Harriet Martineau (expressed in the above prefatory letter), that any correspondence occasioned by the publication of this pamphlet be addressed to the undersigned,

Henry Whitworth, SECRETARY TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FACTORY OCCUPIERS.

13, Corporation Street, Manchester.

Special legislation.— The Factory Controversy.

SPECIAL LEGISLATION.— THE FACTORY CONTROVERSY.

Reports of the Inspectors of Factories, to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, for the Half-year ending 31st October, 1854.

Reports, &c. &c. for the Half-year ending 30th April, 1S55.

The Factories Acts. 1833 and 1844.

Special Report of the Executive Committee of the National Association of Factory Occupiers. July, 1855.

Rules of the National Association of Factory Occupiers. Established 17th April, 1855.

Oldham Chronicle. February 10th, 1855.

Worthington and Others v. the Magistrates of Oldham. April 12th, 1855.

Manchester Guardian. February 22nd, 1854.

Schofield v. Schunck. April, 1855. In the Queen's Bench.

Ashworth v. Wild. April, 1855.

Table of Accidents in Factories by Machinery.

"Fencing with Humanity." "Death's Cyphering Book." "Deadly Shafts." "More Grist to the Mill."

Somebody says, every day, at present, that some subject or other must stand over till the end of the war. For two parliamentary sessions, this has been the plea of the politic for ignoring troublesome topics, and the excuse of the timid for postponing difficult discussions. We have never admitted the soundness of the plea or the excuse, in regard to any matter of real importance and interest, because we saw, as any body may see who chooses to look, that science, art, manufactures, and education, made progress during the very worst days of the List war. When the Berlin Decrees were in full force; when the marine highway was as infested with enemies as the great roads of the Continent; when we had no allies, or worse than none, in carrying on the struggle for our national existence, we were trying our first experiments in popular education, working out the leading principles of political economy, developing our cotton manufacture, trying our first experiments with steam, laying the foundations of geological science, obtaining glimpses into an entirely new world through the avenues of chemistry, cataloguing the stars, enjoying enthusiasms about authors and new departments of literature, and going wild after Siddons and Catalani. After such an experience as that, it is really nonsense to talk of a stagnation of national interests through our present war. If, in the very crisis of our national existence and fortunes, Wollaston, and Davy, and Cavendish, and Maskelyne, and Herschel were extending the bounds of science; and Horner and Malthus were discovering principles and propounding theories in political economy; and the machinery of our cotton manufacture was adding two millions to our population; and the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews arose; and Wilberforce and Hannah More taught in adult schools; and Romilly reformed the criminal law; and musical festivals arose; and the stage was at its culminating point of influence and prosperity,—what an absurdity it seems to pretend that we are too busy with our one enemy, whom we have cooped up within his own frontier, to attend to national, or social, or personal objects! It ought not to be true, and it is not true: witness the amount of autumn travelling, and of autumn sporting this year, and the great round of agricultural celebrations; and the Glasgow meeting of the British Association; and the Birmingham Festival,—spirited, and successful beyond all precedent; and the sale of Tennyson's "Maud;" and the interest in the Paris Exposition, and almost every sign of the time that can be adduced. It ought not to be true, and it is not true, that the war has made us disregard objects of genuine interest and importance.

If it had, we should now have felt bound to make a solemn appeal to the fears of our fellow-citizens, where we hope and believe that it will he enough simply to request and attract their attention. If we believed that their wits were wool-gathering in the East, we should recal them by a loud alarm about the danger of their liberties at home; but, confident as we are, that our neighbours are nearly as much in earnest as ever about affairs at home, we feel that we need only put before them certain facts of the day to induce them to watch their own liberties while sacrificing so largely as they are doing on behalf of those of all Europe.

One of the fair features of the just war in which we are engaged is, that it is sweeping away some of the corruptions, and rehabilitating some of the degeneracies bred by the long peace. One of the duties of patriotism is to see that the besom is not turned from its course by fear or favour; that no damp, dirty corner is shut up from purification, in the hope that people will be too much engrossed to find it out: and it is in discharge of this duty that we now call attention to certain facts, showing that the false philanthropy, which is one of the bad growths of the recent time—the proud-flesh of our body politic—is corrupting our social condition, and encroaching on the very principles of our liberties, as actively as before the war began. For twenty years past, the most enlightened and reflective men in all advanced nations have lamented, as the most disastrous of the ignorances and incapacities of the time, the universal disorder of men's minds on the all-important point of the true sphere and proper duties of government. In England, where there are no revolutions going forward,—either periodical, as in the United States; or occasional, as on the Continent,—it might be expected that the government, or at least the parliamentary portion of it, would have some notion, fixed enough for common use, as to what its own business was, even if speculative philosophers were still far from the end of their controversies as to the true scope of legislation, and function of the executive. But experience shows that even in stable, quiet, constitutional England, there is still plenty of uncertainty about the relations between the government and several classes, if not the whole, of the nation. Our fathers outgrew the meddling of successive governments with the cost of their food and the mode of their dress. Our own fathers told us we had nothing more to fear from attempts to fix the rate of wages by Act of Parliament. Yet here we are once again in the midst of confusion and actual danger to our liberties, from the same tendency in busy and shallow minds to recur to legislation for the carrying of their objects, encouraged as that tendency is by the ignorance and carelessness of our law-makers and their constituents, as to the principles which should prescribe and limit the sphere of legislation. When we are in Paris, we thank our stars that we are not trammelled by law and police in every act of our lives; that we can buy a dose of medicine without a permit, and draw our supplies from the country without paying a tax at the city gates, When we talk by the fire-side with our elderly relations, we hear wonderful stories of the old plagues of excise intrusion, and the custom-house tyranny which made our whole coast a harbourage for smugglers; and we think it a fine thing to live in times of such domestic freedom as the present. Yet, in this very present, so free, and so convenient in its freedom, there has been an advancing encroachment on the liberty of the citizen, aggravated since the war began to an intolerable degree, which justifies our appeal to government, and yet more to the constituents of government, to take care what they are about. The false philanthropy, which is one of the unwholesome growths of a protracted period of abeyance of national objects, has so acted upon the ignorance and carelessness of society, in regard to the true function of our rulers, as to place us in more serious social danger than our fathers supposed we had yet to go through from such a cause.

There is nothing like a true story, fully told, for illustrating truths of a moral or political class. We shall, therefore, relate a true story, making choice of our narrative for its fulness and clearness, and not through any partiality on other grounds. It is nothing to us whether, in exhibiting the mischiefs of meddling legislation, we tell the story of the Maine Liquor Law in America, or the passport system in Austria, or sumptuary legislation in Sweden, or Sabbatarian enactments in England. Whatever illustrates our meaning is good for our purpose, and whatever best illustrates our meaning is best for our purpose. We prefer, on this ground, out of a pretty large class of stories which we might relate, the narrative of the proceedings of the Factory Inspectors, under the countenance of the government, since the opening of the war. When the question is of the mischiefs arising from meddling legislation, it is difficult to say which case out of any number may be most important through the harm done; for the harm done is altogether immeasurable in every instance: but we may safely say that no case could well be more serious than this of the rupture between the government and the body of textile manufacturers of Great Britain, because the issue to which the controversy is now brought is that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures or the existing factory law. The two cannot longer coexist. This very serious case is the one we have selected to exhibit in full. The facts are as open to all the world as to ourselves. The documents from which we derive our materials are all public; and if our readers should be surprised presently to find what a point the controversy has reached, it will not be because we have any revelations to make, but simply because we have been led to observe what has escaped their attention.

It can hardly be necessary to offer any excuse for the commonplace aspect of the incidents of the story. The justification of the narrative lies in the one particular that an all-important principle is involved in it. Every reader will here think of ship-money. We need, therefore, say nothing about it,—at least, more than this. If it should flit across anybody's mind that we are making much ado about tiresome and trivial matters, let him then think of ship-money, and he will read to the end.

It is a very small department of factory legislation that we are going to speak of. The great subjects of hours of labour and wages do not concern us here; nor does the general heading of the security of machinery, though Lord Palmerston and the Factory Inspectors mislead the public, and, perhaps, themselves into thinking that it does. The one point on which the existing controversy proceeds is not the securing the entire machinery in factories, but only horizontal shafts; and not all horizontal shafts, but only those which are, at least, seven feet from the ground. Upon this one point a story has now to be told, on the result of which must depend a long train of consequences, not only to the manufacturing interest (that is, to several millions of our people), but to the liberties of the whole nation. The question is of persistence in a wrong principle of legislation, or return to a right one.

The provisions of the Factory Acts (of 1833 and 1844) for the protection of the factory population from accidents by machinery, were not enforced for nine years. In 1853, the Factory Inspectors brought under the notice of the Secretary of State the "enormous amount" of accidents caused by contact with machinery, in comparison with other accidents among factory operatives. The whole number of accidents from machinery, in three years, was reported to be 11,716, of which 3,434 were of a serious character. The serious ones are all that require any notice, as the others are of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance. 700 are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the Act. Now, it should be observed that, of the whole number of accidents in three years, 128 had occurred from shafts; that is about 42 in a year. Of the 128, 35 resulted in death, or a fraction above 11 in a year. In other words, the number of persons affected by the factory law being from 500,000 to 600,000, the proportion injured in any way by accident from this cause is (assuming the lowest number of people) about one in 12,000; and the proportion of deaths among them is about one in 45,000. This is the proportion on the showing of the Inspectors; and those who care to institute a comparison between the danger of this and other modes of occupation will find that in no other is the proportion of deaths so small. Coroners' returns have been examined with this view, and the results are very interesting; but we are not concerned with them here. We need only say, in illustration of the spirit of the Inspectors' reports and of Lord Palmerston's proceedings, that the coroners' reports show that, in the factory districts, the fatal accidents from carts and other agencies concerned in labour were 79 to 29 in factories; and of the factory accidents, not five per cent are owing to machinery. In the year preceding that in which the Inspectors made their appeal to Lord Palmerston, there were 12 deaths from factory machinery in the whole kingdom; whereas the deaths from other accidents, in Manchester alone, were 531. By as near a computation as can be made in the imperfect state of our statistics, the number of fatal accidents in the United Kingdom averages about 5,000, of which 12 are cases of mill accidents from all kinds of factory machinery. These particulars will show how ill authorised is the Inspectors' representation of the "enormous amount" of accidents in factories; but otherwise they are of no consequence here. Whether it is true or not, that there are fewer accidents from the shafting of mills than from any other industrial apparatus of any magnitude, it is our business to see how accidents can he best guarded against,—in other words, what is the true relation between the millowner and the government on the one hand, and his workpeople on the other. Whether the deaths be 12 or 12,000 in a year, the question is—what ought to be done? There is the Common Law, which operates for the protection of all; and there are the Factory Acts, which are intended for the special protection of factory operatives. The question is, how these special Acts stand in relation to the protection of life and constitutional liberty; what they contain, and how they are administered.

In reply to the Inspectors' Report of April, 1853, Lord Palmerston called the attention of the inspectors to the accidents "from machinery" which had occurred, to the number of 2,119, in the preceding half-year. In the Report by which they replied to the then Home Secretary, the Inspectors pass over altogether without notice, 2,098 of these accidents, and report only on 128, which had occurred from shafting in the course of three years (six times the period in question). Lord Palmerston seems to have been satisfied with their notice of one in a hundred of the cases he commended to their examination, and he certainly asked no questions about the two thousand and odd, and "how to prevent their recurrence." If he had known that the bulk of the larger number were mere finger cuts, rubs, and bruises, the omission might be less remarkable; but it is clear, from the next proceeding, that he had no idea of the sort.

At the suggestion of the Factory Inspectors, Lord Palmerston resolved that the Factory Acts should be enforced in those provisions which had hitherto been left unused; and happy was this determination, in another sense than that which was intended. The immediate effect of this resolution was to convulse the manufacturing interests of the kingdom; but the necessary result will be the ascertainment of what the powers of the Factory Acts really are, and a testing of their practicability. In January, 1854, a circular was issued by the Factory Inspectors, stating that they had represented to the Secretary of State that they found the time had arrived for insisting that shafts at any distance whatever from the floor should be fenced. In their own words:—

"In these circumstances, although fully aware of the great trouble and expense it will cause to millowners, we feel that we have no alternative but henceforth to enforce the provisions of sec. 21 (7 Vic.) strictly, by requiring that every shaft, whether upright, oblique, or horizontal, shall be securely fenced, whatever may be its height from the floor, unless it should be demonstrated to us that any particular shaft cannot be fenced without interfering with the action of the machinery."—Report of Inspectors, April, 1855, p. 57.

It is clear that the interpretation of this order rests upon the meaning of the words "securely fenced." The circular was submitted to Lord Palmerston before it was issued; and it was revised and abridged by him. Here begins a world of difficulty and misunderstanding, which proves, if nothing else, the dubious and ineffectual character and operation of minute legislation, interfering with industrial processes. Lord Palmerston and the Inspectors seem to be chargeable with loose statements and shifting requirements, through their own inexperience in industrial methods, and the want of precision in the law; and the manufacturers arc naturally indignant at being subject to the imperious bidding of authorities whose language is inaccurate, and whose conduct has been, in some respects, as will appear, unconstitutional and illegal.

The millowners understood this circular to convey an order that all shafts should be "permanently cased with wood or iron," Mr. Leonard Horner having repeatedly declared that sort of fencing to be the only secure one for vertical shafts, and for horizontal ones under seven feet in height; whereas he at the same time declared that rectangular hooks (of which more presently) are a security against one danger, "but not against other accidents;" while he stated in the same paragraph, that "adequate means must be adopted" "against all accidents from an horizontal shaft." Most people, we think, would understand by these instructions that Mr. Horner required the millowners to secure their horizontal shafts by permanent cases of wood or iron. If nothing else was safe in regard to shafts under seven feet high, and rectangular hooks were a security against one only out of various kinds of danger, at the same time that the owners were required to render "all accidents" impossible, the conclusion of the manufacturers, that they were required to enclose all their horizontal shafts in permanent casings, seems not only justifiable, but almost unavoidable. There seems to be no doubt that Lord Palmerston himself so understood the direction. He was waited upon in March, 1854, by a large deputation of millowners and master-manufacturers, who represented to him, that only shafts under seven feet high, and in particular circumstances of position, could need casing; that there was no objection made to casing these, which indeed was generally done; and that there were insuperable objections, which they fully explained, to casing shafts above that height—objections, not only on account of the expense and trouble (which, however, Lord Palmerston seemed entirely to appreciate), but on the ground of aggravated danger to the workers, and to the safety of the mill altogether. "The deputation," say the Inspectors, on Lord Palmerston's information, "expressed on their own part, and on the part of their constituents, a most anxious desire to protect the lives and limbs of their workpeople. Lord Palmerston," they continue, "is inclined to think, from the representations thus made to him, that the security required by the Factory Act might, in regard to horizontal shafts at a greater height from the floor than seven feet, be attained by various means; and his Lordship has directed, that inasmuch as the circular of the 31st of January last has been construed to require the universal adoption of a permanent fixed casing, that circular should be for the present suspended, and need not be acted upon."—Report, October, 1854.

It appears that before Mr. Horner stimulated Lord Palmerston (as he avows he did) to command the issue of the circular, he consulted Mr. Fairbairn, the engineer, as to the practicability of fencing the higher range of horizontal shafting in mills. Mr. Fairbairn's reply, dated December 20th, 1853, appeared in the newspapers, and is now before us. The first sentence contains the pith of the whole. "I do not see how it is possible to fence off the horizontal shafts of mills driving machinery, without incurring greater evils, and probably more danger, than at present exists by their being left entirely open." So far the engineer. At the same time the agent of a Fire Insurance Company gave it as his opinion, that, if the government order were carried out, there ought to be "an increased rate of assurance upon mills which had these boxed-up channels of wood, choked with highly inflammable substances, so that they would act like trains of gunpowder; and if a fire arose, away went the mill without any possibility of salvation." In giving evidence on a trial a year later, Mr. Fairbairn said that "his attention had been directed to the question of fencing shafts, from the time the thing was first mooted; and his conclusion was, that the use of casing would be exceedingly inconvenient, and would greatly increase danger instead of lessening it. He alluded to horizontal shafts; for vertical shafts were now commonly fenced off. Horizontal shafts, less than seven feet from the floor, should be fenced or boxed; but when they were more than seven feet high, he was decidedly of opinion that they were safer when not boxed. There must always be danger caused from the necessity of suspending the fencing for shafts,—danger to those who had to put on the straps, and also from the possibility of the suspenders giving way. His decided conviction was that the best way of securely fencing a shaft 11 feet from the ground was to turn it truly, polish it brightly, and leave it open, so that its operation might be seen, and any attempt to tamper with straps and pulleys at once discovered."—Oldham Chronicle, February 10th, 1855.