Das Kapital

THE WORKING DAY

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Ten
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day
Contents
Section 1 - The Limits of the Working-Day
Section 2 - The Greed for Surplus-Labour. Manufacturer and Boyard
Section 3 - Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation
Section 4 - Day and Night Work. The Relay System
Section 5 - The Struggle for a Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working-Day from the Middle of the 14th to the End of the 17th Century
Section 6 - The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864
Section 7 - The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Reaction of the English Factory Acts on Other Countries
SECTION 1
THE LIMITS OF THE WORKING-DAY
We started with the supposition that labour-power
is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities,
is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production
of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours,
he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power,
or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary
part of his working-day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris
paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working-day itself is not yet given.
Let us assume that the line A–––B represents the length of the necessary working-time, say 6 hours. If the labour be prolonged 1, 3, or 6 hours beyond A—–B, we have 3 other lines:
Working-day I.Working-day II.Working-day III.
A–––B–C.A–––B––C.A–––B–––C.
representing 3 different working-days of 7, 9, and 12 hours. The extension
B—–C of the line A—–B represents the length of the surplus-labour. As
the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable
quantity B—–C. Since A—–B is constant, the ratio of B—–C to A—–B can
always be calculated. In working-day I, it is 1/6, in working-day II, 3/6,
in working day III 6/6 of A—–B. Since further the ratio (surplus working-time)/(necessary working-time), determines the rate of the surplus-value, the latter is given by the ratio
of B—-C to A—-B. It amounts in the 3 different working-days respectively
to 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. On the other hand, the rate of surplus-value
alone would not give us the extent of the working-day. If this rate, e.g.,  were
100 per cent., the working-day might be of 8, 10, 12, or more hours. It
would indicate that the 2 constituent parts of the working-day, necessary-labour
and surplus-labour time, were equal in extent, but not how long each of
these two constituent parts was.
The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity.
One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required
for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer himself. But its
total amount varies with the duration of the surplus-labour. The working-day
is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate.
Although the working-day is not a fixed, but a fluent quantity,
it can, on the other hand, only vary within certain limits. The minimum
limit is, however, not determinable; of course, if we make the extension
line B—‑C or the surplus-labour = 0, we have a minimum limit, i.e.,
the part of the day which the labourer must necessarily work for his own
maintenance. On the basis of capitalist production, however, this necessary
labour can form a part only of the working-day; the working-day itself
can never be reduced to this minimum. On the other hand, the working-day
has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This
maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First, by the physical bounds
of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend
only a definite quantity of his vital force. A horse, in like manner, can
only work from day to day, 8 hours. During part of the day this force must
rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical
needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical
limitations, the extension of the working-day encounters moral ones. The
labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the
extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social
advancement. The variation of the working-day fluctuates, therefore, within
physical and social bounds. But both these limiting conditions are of a
very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working-days
of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.
The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To
him its use-value belongs during one working-day. He has thus acquired
the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But, what is
a working-day?
At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The
capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule [the outermost limit], the necessary
limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified.
His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse,
the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor,
the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking
living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during
which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes
the labour-power he has purchased of him.
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs
the capitalist.
The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange
of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible
benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the
labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process
of production, rises:
The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of
other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than
its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous
expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power. You
and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities.
And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts
with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs
the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay
for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again.
Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the
morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness
as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence.”
Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power,
and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in
motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its
normal duration, and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of
the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater
than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance.
The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different
things. If the average time that (doing a reasonable amount of work) an
average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-power, which
you pay me from day to day is 1/(365×30) or 1/10950 of its total value.
But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of
1/3650 of its total value, i.e., only 1/3 of its daily value,
and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity.
You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That
is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore,
a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your
heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model
citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you
represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems
to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day
because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity.
We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature
of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day,
no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser
when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make,
whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the
peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption
by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he
wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There
is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing
the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence
is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of
what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle
between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and
collective labour, i.e., the working-class.
SECTION 2
THE GREED FOR SURPLUS-LABOUR. MANUFACTURER AND BOYARD
Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever
a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the
labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for
his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means
of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian caloς cagaqoς [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist. It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value
but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited
by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no
boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production
itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object
is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in
the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here
the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose
production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour,
&c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated
by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for
export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work
are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence
the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved
something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly
directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export
of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of
the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became
a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question
of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now
a question of production of surplus-labour itself: So was it
also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now
Roumania).
The comparison of the greed for surplus-labour in the Danubian
Principalities with the same greed in English factories has a special interest,
because surplus-labour in the corvée has an independent and palpable
form.
Suppose the working-day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour,
and 6 hours of surplus-labour. Then the free labourer gives the capitalist
every week 6 x 6 or 36 hours of surplus-labour. It is the same as if he
worked 3 days in the week for himself, and 3 days in the week gratis for
the capitalist. But this is not evident on the surface. Surplus-labour
and necessary labour glide one into the other. I can, therefore, express
the same relationship by saying, e.g., that the labourer in every minute
works 30 seconds for himself, and 30 for the capitalist, etc. It is otherwise
with the corvée. The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant
does for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour
on behalf of the Boyard. The one he does on his own field, the other on
the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time exist, therefore,
independently, side by side one with the other. In the corvée the
surplus-labour is accurately marked off from the necessary labour. This,
however, can make no difference with regard to the quantitative relation
of surplus-labour to necessary labour. Three days’ surplus-labour in the
week remain three days that yield no equivalent to the labourer himself,
whether it be called corvée or wage-labour. But in the capitalist
the greed for surplus-labour appears in the straining after an unlimited
extension of the working-day, in the Boyard more simply in a direct hunting
after days of corvée.
In the Danubian Principalities the corvée was mixed up
with rents in kind and other appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the
most important tribute paid to the ruling class. Where this was the case,
the corvée rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently
on the other hand took origin from the corvée. This is what took place in the Roumanian provinces. Their original
mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic
or Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severalty as freehold
by the members of the community, another part — ager publicus —
was cultivated by them in common. The products of this common labour served
partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly
as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common
expenses. In course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped,
along with the common land, the labour spent upon it. The labour of the
free peasants on their common land was transformed into corvée for
the thieves of the common land. This corvée soon developed into
a servile relationship existing in point of fact, not in point of law,
until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal under presence
of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corvée, which the Russian
General Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards
themselves. Thus Russia conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian
provinces, and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe.
According to the “Règlement organique,” as this code of
the corvée is called, every Wallachian peasant owes to the so-called
landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days
of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one
day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the year. With deep insight into
Political Economy, however, the working-day is not taken in its ordinary
sense, but as the working-day necessary to the production of an average
daily product; and that average daily product is determined in so crafty
a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours. In dry words,
the Réglement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12
working-days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36
days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in
like manner three times as much. In all, 42 corvée days. To this
had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for extraordinary
occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has
to furnish annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional
corvée is estimated at 14 days for each Wallachian peasant. Thus
the prescribed corvée amounts to 56 working-days yearly. But the
agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate
only 210 days, of which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for
bad weather, together 70 days, do not count. 140 working-days remain. The
ratio of the corvée to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives
a much smaller rate of surplus-value than that which regulates the labour
of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only
the legally prescribed corvée. And in a spirit yet more “liberal”
than the English Factory Acts, the “Règlement organique”
has known how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days
out of 12, the nominal day’s work of each of the 56 corvée days
is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day.
In one day, e.g., must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work,
especially in maize plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day’s
work for some kinds of agricultural labour is interpretable in such a way
that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia conditions
are still harder.
“The 12 corvée days of the ‘Règlement organique’
cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year.”
If the Règlement organique of the Danubian provinces was
a positive expression of the greed for surplus-labour which every paragraph
legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the
same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining
of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations,
made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the
working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of
factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over
the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one
case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living
force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly
as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France.
The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average
working-day 10 hours, i.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to
6 p.m., including ½ an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and
thus leaving 10½ working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m.
to 2 p.m., of which ½ an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours
are left, 10½ for each of the first 5 days, 7½ for the last.
Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors,
directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly,
by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the
capitalistic greed for surplus-labour.
Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors.
“The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes
more, sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves off a quarter of an hour
(sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the
beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast,
and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for
dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less)
after 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is —
Before 6 a.m.,15 minutes.
After 6 p.m.,
15 "
At breakfast time,
10 "
At dinner time,
20 "
Five days — 300 minutes,60 "
On Saturday before 6 a.m., 15 minutes.
At breakfast time, 10 "
After 2 p.m., 15 "
40 minutes.
Total weekly,
340 minutes.
Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working
weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages)
is equal to 27 working-days.”
“Five minutes a day’s increased work, multiplied by weeks, are
equal to two and a half days of produce in the year.”
“An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6
a.m., after 6 p.m., and at the beginning and end of the times nominally
fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year.”

Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories
work “short time,” i.e., for only a part of the week, naturally do not
affect the tendency to extend the working-day. The less business there
is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time
spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
Thus the Factory Inspector’s report on the period of the crisis
from 1857 to 1858:
“It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking
at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression
by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. ... In the last half
year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up;
143 were found standing,” yet, over-work is continued beyond the legal
hours.
“For a great part of the time,” says Mr. Howell, “owing to the
depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still
greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive
about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an
hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the
times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment.”
The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from 1861 to 1865.
“It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory,
either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave
the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force
them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c.], especially on Saturday
afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has
ceased to revolve ... they would not have been so employed if sufficient
time had been set apart specially for cleaning, &c., either before
6 a.m. [sic.!] or before 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoons.”
“The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the
Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist;
they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see
the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted
have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still
be a considerable balance of gain.... In cases
where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts
in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors
making out a case.”
These “small thefts” of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation
time, the factory inspectors also designate as “petty pilferings of minutes,”
“snatching a few minutes,” or, as the labourers technically called them, “nibbling and cribbling at meal-times.”
It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus-value
by surplus-labour, is no secret.
“If you allow me,” said a highly respectable
master to me, “to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one
thousand a year in my pocket.” “Moments are the
elements of profit.”
Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the
designation of the workers who work full time as “full-timers,” and the
children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as “half-timers.”
The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual
distinctions are merged in those of “full-timers” and “half-timers.”
SECTION 3
BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION
We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension
of the working-day, the were-wolf’s hunger for surplus-labour in a department
where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois
economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins,
caused capital at last to be bound by the chains
of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of
production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters
to this day, or was so yesterday.
Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman
of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January,
1860, “that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion
of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts
of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilised world .... Children of nine or
ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock
in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten,
eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling,
their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like
torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.... We are not surprised that Mr.
Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against
discussion.... The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one
of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually....
What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition
that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours
a day? .... We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters.
Is their black-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more
detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order
that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?”

The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years,
been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied
in Mr. Scriven’s Report of 1841 to the “
Children’s Employment Commissioners,”
in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical
officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly,
in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the “First Report of the Children’s
Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 1863.” For my purpose it is enough
to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited
children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the
adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry
by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful
occupation.
William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began
to work. He “ran moulds” (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room,
afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the beginning. He came to
work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. “I work
till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight
weeks.”
Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12
years of age, says: “I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes
I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning.
I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or
nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning.
I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night.
I worked two nights last week.”
Fernyhough, a boy of ten:
“I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on Thursday,
Friday, and Saturday.”
Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery
districts of Stoke-on-Trent, and Wolstanton is extraordinarily short. Although
in the district of Stoke, only 36.6% and in Wolstanton only 30.4%
of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries, among
the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second,
nearly 2/5 of the whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among
the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical practitioner at Hanley, says:
“Each
successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the
preceding one.”
In like manner another doctor, Mr. M’Bean:
“Since he began
to practice among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a marked degeneration
especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth.”
These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860.
From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr.
J. T. Arledge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says:
“The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population,
both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped,
and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and
are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit
their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders
of the liver and kidneys, and by rheumatism. But of all diseases they are
especially prone to chest-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis,
and asthma. One form would appear peculiar to them, and is known as potter’s
asthma, or potter’s consumption. Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones,
or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters
.... That the ‘degenerescence’ of the population of this district is not
even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from the adjacent
country, and intermarriages with more healthy races.”
Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution,
writes in a letter to Commissioner Longe, amongst other things:
“I can only speak from personal observation and not from statistical data, but
I do not hesitate to assert that my indignation has been aroused again
and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed
to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers.” He enumerates the
causes of the diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase,
“long hours.” The report of the Commission trusts that “a manufacture which
has assumed so prominent a place in the whole world, will not long be subject
to the remark that its great success is accompanied with the physical deterioration,
widespread bodily suffering, and early death of the workpeople ... by whose
labour and skill such great results have been achieved.”

And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland.
The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery
of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this
manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially
amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it
has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered
to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children
under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on
account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that
only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows
and so forth, deliver up their children to it, “the ragged, half-starved,
untaught children.”
Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270
were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range
of the working-day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times,
meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent
with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno
surpassed in this manufacture.
In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed
by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). The most active business
months are from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this
time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a.m.
to 10 p.m. or further into the night.
J. Leach deposes:
“Last winter six out of nineteen girls were
away from ill-health at one time from over-work. I have to bawl at them
to keep them awake.” W. Duffy: “I have seen when the children could none
of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could.” J.
Lightbourne: “Am 13 ... We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter
before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter.”
G. Apsden: “That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry him
on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a
day ... I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine,
for he could not leave it or stop.” Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester
factory: “We (he means his “hands” who work for “us”) work on with no stoppage
for meals, so that day’s work of 10½ hours is finished by 4.30 p.m.,
and all after that is over-time.” (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 10½ hours?) “We (this same Smith) seldom leave off working before 6 p.m.
(he means leave off the consumption
of “our” labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are really
working over-time the whole year round. For all these, children and adults
alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work
for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78
1/2 hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the
average was higher — 8 days or 84 hours a week.”
Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremely devoted to the pluralis majestatis
[the Royal “we,” i.e., speaking on behalf of his subjects], adds with
a smile, "Machine-work is not great.” So the employers in the block-printing
say: “Hand labour is more healthy than machine work.” On the whole, manufacturers
declare with indignation against the proposal “to stop the machines at
least during meal-times.”
“A clause,” says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper
factory in the Borough, “which allowed work between, say 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
in would suit us (!) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
are not suitable. Our machine is always stopped for dinner. (What generosity!)
There is no waste of paper and colour to speak of. But,” he adds sympathetically,
“I can understand the loss of time not being liked.”
The report of the Commission opines with naïveté that the fear of some “leading firms”
of losing time, i.e., the time for appropriating the labour of others,
and thence losing profit is not a sufficient reason for allowing children
under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to
lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied
to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel — as merely auxiliary
material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production
itself.
No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account
the making of bread by machinery recently introduced) has preserved up
to the present day a method of production so archaic, so — as we see from
the poets of the Roman Empire — pre-christian, as baking. But capital,
as was said earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical
character of the labour-process; it begins by taking it just as it finds
it.
The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was
first revealed by the House of Commons Committee “on the adulteration of
articles of food” (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall’s work, “Adulterations detected.”
The consequence of these revelations was the Act
of August 6th, 1860, “for preventing the adulteration of articles of food
and drink,” an inoperative law, as it naturally shows the tenderest consideration
for every Free-trader who determines by the buying or selling of adulterated
commodities “to turn an honest penny.” The Committee itself formulated more or less naïvely its conviction that Free-trade
meant essentially trade with adulterated, or as the English ingeniously
put it, “sophisticated” goods. In fact this kind of sophistry knows better
than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than
the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos [before your own eyes] that everything is only
appearance.
At all events the Committee had directed the attention of the
public to its “daily bread,” and therefore to the baking trade. At the
same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament rose the cry
of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &c. The cry
was so urgent that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission
of 1863 several times mentioned, was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry.
His report, together with the evidence given, roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat
of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily
in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge
of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without
counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients. Without any
regard to his holiness, Free-trade, the free baking-trade was therefore
placed under the supervision of the State inspectors (Close of the Parliamentary
session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the
evening to 5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers under 18.
The last clause speaks volumes as to the over-work in this old-fashioned,
homely line of business.
“The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about
eleven at night. At that hour he ‘makes the dough,’ — a laborious process,
which lasts from half an hour to three quarters of an hour, according to
the size of the batch or the labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down
upon the kneading-board, which is also the covering of the trough in which
the dough is ‘made’; and with a sack under him, and another rolled up as
a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of hours. He is then engaged in
a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours — throwing out the
dough, ‘scaling it off,’ moulding it, putting it into the oven, preparing
and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven,
and up into the shop, &c., &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges
from about 75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates
usually to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the
business of making the bread, rolls, &c., is over, that of its distribution
begins, and a considerable proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after
working hard in the manner described during the night, are upon their legs
for many hours during the day, carrying baskets, or wheeling hand-carts,
and sometimes again in the bakehouse, leaving off work at various hours
between 1 and 6 p.m. according to the season of the year, or the amount
and nature of their master’s business; while others are again engaged in
the bakehouse in ‘bringing out’ more batches until late in the afternoon.
... During what is called ‘the London season,’
the operatives belonging to the ‘full-priced’ bakers at the West End of
the town, generally begin work at 11 p.m., and are engaged in making the
bread, with one or two short (sometimes very short) intervals of rest,
up to 8 o’clock the next morning. They are then engaged all day long, up
to 4, 5, 6, and as late as 7 o’clock in the evening carrying out bread,
or sometimes in the afternoon in the bakehouse again, assisting in the
biscuit-baking. They may have, after they have done their work, sometimes
five or six, sometimes only four or five hours’ sleep before they begin
again. On Fridays they always begin sooner, some about ten o’clock,
and continue in some cases, at work, either in making or delivering the
bread up to 8 p.m. on Saturday night, but more generally up to 4 or 5 o’clock,
Sunday morning. On Sundays the men must attend twice or three times during
the day for an hour or two to make preparations for the next day’s bread....
The men employed by the underselling masters (who sell their bread under
the ‘full price,’ and who, as already pointed out, comprise three-fourths
of the London bakers) have not only to work on the average longer hours,
but their work is almost entirely confined to the bakehouse. The underselling
masters generally sell their bread... in the shop. If they send it out,
which is not common, except as supplying chandlers’ shops, they usually
employ other hands for that purpose. It is not their practice to deliver
bread from house to house. Towards the end of the week ... the men begin
on Thursday night at 10 o’clock, and continue on with only slight intermission
until late on Saturday evening.”
Even the bourgeois intellect understands the position of the “underselling”
masters. “The unpaid labour of the men was made the source whereby the
competition was carried on.” And the “full-priced” baker denounces his underselling competitors to the Commission of Inquiry
as thieves of foreign labour and adulterators.
“They only exist now by
first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of their
men for 12 hours’ wages.”
The adulteration of bread and the formation of a class of bakers
that sells the bread below the full price, date from the beginning of the
18th century, from the time when the corporate character of the trade was
lost, and the capitalist in the form of the miller or flour-factor, rises
behind the nominal master baker. Thus was laid the foundation of capitalistic production in this trade, of the unlimited extension
of the working-day and of night-labour, although the latter only since
1824 gained a serious footing, even in London.
After what has just been said, it will be understood that the
Report of the Commission classes journeymen bakers among the short-lived labourers,
who, having by good luck escaped the normal decimation of the children
of the working-class, rarely reach the age of 42. Nevertheless, the baking
trade is always overwhelmed with applicants. The sources of the supply
of these labour-powers to London are Scotland, the western agricultural
districts of England, and Germany.
In the years 1858-60, the journeymen bakers in Ireland organised
at their own expense great meetings to agitate against night and Sunday
work. The public — e.g., at the Dublin meeting in May, 1860 — took their
part with Irish warmth. As a result of this movement, day-labour alone
was successfully established in Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Waterford,
&c.
“In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are demonstrated
to be excessive, the movement has been defeated by the opposition of the
master bakers, the miller bakers being the greatest opponents. The example
of Limerick led to a retrogression in Ennis and Tipperary. In Cork, where
the strongest possible demonstration of feeling took place, the masters,
by exercising their power of turning the men out of employment, have defeated
the movement. In Dublin, the master bakers have offered the most determined
opposition to the movement, and by discountenancing as much as possible
the journeymen promoting it, have succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence
in Sunday work and night-work, contrary to the convictions of the men.”

The Committee of the English Government, which Government, in
Ireland, is armed to the teeth, and generally knows how to show it, remonstrates
in mild, though funereal, tones with the implacable master bakers of Dublin,
Limerick, Cork, &c.:
“The Committee believe that the hours of labour
are limited by natural laws, which cannot be violated with impunity. That
for master bakers to induce their workmen, by the fear of losing employment,
to violate their religious convictions and their better feelings, to disobey
the laws of the land, and to disregard public opinion (this all refers
to Sunday labour), is calculated to provoke ill-feeling between workmen
and masters, ... and affords an example dangerous to religion, morality,
and social order.... The Committee believe that any constant work beyond
12 hours a-day encroaches on the domestic and private life of the working-man,
and so leads to disastrous moral results, interfering with each man’s home,
and the discharge of his family duties as a son, a brother, a husband,
a father. That work beyond 12 hours has a tendency to undermine the health
of the workingman, and so leads to premature old age and death, to the
great injury of families of working-men, thus deprived of the care and
support of the head of the family when most required.”
So far, we have dealt with Ireland. On the other side of
the channel, in Scotland, the agricultural labourer, the ploughman, protests
against his 13-14 hours’ work in the most inclement climate, with 4 hours’
additional work on Sunday (in this land of Sabbatarians!), whilst, at the same time, three railway men are standing before a London coroner’s jury — a guard, an engine-driver, a signalman. A tremendous
railway accident has hurried hundreds of passengers into another world.
The negligence of the employee is the cause of the misfortune. They declare
with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before, their labour
only lasted eight hours a-day. During the last five or six years it had
been screwed up to 14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a specially severe pressure
of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it often lasted for 40
or 50 hours without a break. They were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a
certain point their labour-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain
ceased to think, their eyes to see. The thoroughly “respectable” British
jurymen answered by a verdict that sent them to the next assizes on a charge
of manslaughter, and, in a gentle “rider” to their verdict, expressed the
pious hope that the capitalistic magnates of the railways would, in future,
be more extravagant in the purchase of a sufficient quantity of labour-power,
and more “abstemious,” more “self-denying,” more “thrifty,” in the draining
of paid labour-power.
From the motley crowd of labourers of all callings, ages,
sexes, that press on us more busily than the souls of the slain on Ulysses,
on whom — without referring to the Blue books under their arms — we see
at a glance the mark of over-work, let us take two more figures whose striking
contrast proves that before capital all men are alike — a milliner and
a blacksmith.
In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published
a paragraph with the “sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.”
It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of
age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited
by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power
was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee. It was just
now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling
of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball
in honour of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had
worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in
one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them.
At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the
bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And
this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary
Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment
of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor,
Mr. Keys, called too late to the death-bed, duly bore witness before the
coroner’s jury that
“Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work
in an over-crowded work-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom.”
In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner’s jury
thereupon brought in a verdict that
“the deceased had died of apoplexy,
but there was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated by over-work
in an over-crowded workroom, &c.”
“Our white slaves,” cried the Morning
Star, the organ of the Free-traders, Cobden and Bright, “our white
slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine
and die.”
“It is not in dressmakers’ rooms that working to death is the
order of the day, but in a thousand other places; in every place I had
almost said, where ‘a thriving business’ has to be done.... We will take
the blacksmith as a type. If the poets were true, there is no man so hearty,
so merry, as the blacksmith; he rises early and strikes his sparks before
the sun; he eats and drinks and sleeps as no other man. Working in moderation,
he is, in fact, in one of the best of human positions, physically speaking.
But we follow him into the city or town, and we see the stress of work
on that strong man, and what then is his position in the death-rate of
his country. In Marylebone, blacksmiths die at the rate of 31 per thousand
per annum, or 11 above the mean of the male adults of the country
in its entirety. The occupation, instinctive almost as a portion of human
art, unobjectionable as a branch of human industry, is made by mere excess
of work, the destroyer of the man. He can strike so many blows per day,
walk so many steps, breathe so many breaths, produce so much work, and
live an average, say of fifty years; he is made to strike so many more
blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many more breaths per
day, and to increase altogether a fourth of his life. He meets the effort;
the result is, that producing for a limited time a fourth more work, he
dies at 37 for 50.”
SECTION 4
DAY AND NIGHT WORK. THE RELAY SYSTEM.
Constant capital, the means of production, considered
from the standpoint of the creation of surplus-value, only exist to absorb
labour, and with every drop of labour a proportional quantity of surplus-labour.
While they fail to do this, their mere existence causes a relative loss
to the capitalist, for they represent during the time they lie fallow,
a useless advance of capital. And this loss becomes positive and absolute
as soon as the intermission of their employment necessitates additional
outlay at the recommencement of work. The prolongation of the working-day
beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative.
It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood
of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is,
therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. But as it is
physically impossible to exploit the same individual labour-power constantly
during the night as well as the day, to overcome this physical hindrance,
an alternation becomes necessary between the workpeople whose powers are
exhausted by day, and those who are used up by night. This alternation
may be effected in various ways; e.g., it may be so arranged that part
of the workers are one week employed on day-work, the next week on night-work.
It is well known that this relay system, this alternation of two sets of
workers, held full sway in the full-blooded youth-time of the English cotton
manufacture, and that at the present time it still flourishes, among others,
in the cotton spinning of the Moscow district. This 24 hours’ process of
production exists to-day as a system in many of the branches of industry
of Great Britain that are still “free,” in the blast-furnaces, forges,
plate-rolling mills, and other metallurgical establishments in England,
Wales, and Scotland. The working-time here includes, besides the 24 hours
of the 6 working-days, a great part also of the 24 hours of Sunday. The
workers consist of men and women, adults and children of both
sexes. The ages of the children and young persons run through all intermediate
grades, from 8 (in some cases from 6) to 18.
In some branches of industry, the girls and women work through
the night together with the males.
Placing on one side the generally injurious influence of night-labour,
the duration of the process of production, unbroken during the 24 hours, offers very welcome opportunities of exceeding the
limits of the normal working-day, e.g., in the branches of industry already
mentioned, which are of an exceedingly fatiguing nature; the official working-day
means for each worker usually 12 hours by night or day. But the over-work
beyond this amount is in many cases, to use the words of the English official
report, “truly fearful.”
“It is impossible,” the report continues, “for any mind to realise
the amount of work described in the following passages as being performed
by boys of from 9 to 12 years of age ... without coming irresistibly to
the conclusion that such abuses of the power of parents and of employers
can no longer be allowed to exist.”
"The practice of boys working at all by day and night turns
either in the usual course of things, or at pressing times, seems inevitably
to open the door to their not unfrequently working unduly long hours. These
hours are, indeed, in some cases, not only cruelly but even incredibly
long for children. Amongst a number of boys it will, of course, not unfrequently
happen that one or more are from some cause absent. When this happens,
their place is made up by one or more boys, who work in the other turn.
That this is a well understood system is plain ... from the answer of the
manager of some large rolling-mills, who, when I asked him how the place
of the boys absent from their turn was made up, ‘I daresay, sir, you know
that as well as I do,’ and admitted the fact.”
“At a rolling-mill where the proper hours were from 6 a.m. to
5½ p.m., a boy worked about four nights every week till 8½ p.m. at
least ... and this for six months. Another, at 9 years old, sometimes made
three 12-hour shifts running, and, when 10, has made two days and two nights
running.” A third, “now 10 ... worked from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. three nights,
and till 9 p.m. the other nights.” “Another, now 13, ... worked from 6
p.m. till 12 noon next day, for a week together, and sometimes for three
shifts together, e.g., from Monday morning till Tuesday night.” “Another,
now 12, has worked in an iron foundry at Stavely from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m.
for a fortnight on end; could not do it any more.” “George Allinsworth,
age 9, came here as cellar-boy last Friday; next morning we had to begin
at 3, so I stopped here all night. Live five miles off. Slept on the floor
of the furnace, over head, with an apron under me, and a bit of a jacket
over me. The two other days I have been here at 6 a.m. Aye! it is
hot in here. Before I came here I was nearly a year at the same work at
some works in the country. Began there, too, at 3 on Saturday morning —
always did, but was very gain [near] home, and could sleep at home. Other
days I began at 6 in the morning, and gi’en over at 6 or 7 in the evening,”
&c.
Let us now hear how capital itself regards this 24 hours’
system. The extreme forms of the system, its abuse in the “cruel and incredible”
extension of the working-day are naturally passed over in silence. Capital
only speaks of the system in its “normal” form.
Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, steel manufacturers, who employ
between 600 and 700 persons, among whom only 10 per cent are under 18,
and of those, only 20 boys under 18 work in night sets, thus express themselves:
“The boys do not suffer from the heat. The temperature is probably from
86° to 90°.... At the forges and in the rolling mills the hands
work night and day, in relays, but all the other parts of the work are
day-work, i.e., from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. In the forge the hours are
from 12 to 12. Some of the hands always work in the night, without any
alternation of day and night work.... We do not find any difference in
the health of those who work regularly by night and those who work by day,
and probably people can sleep better if they have the same period of rest
than if it is changed.... About 20 of the boys under the age of 18 work
in the night sets.... We could not well do without lads under 18 working
by night. The objection would be the increase in the cost of production....
Skilled hands and the heads in every department are difficult to get, but
of lads we could get any number.... But from the small proportion of boys
that we employ, the subject (i.e., of restrictions on
night-work) is of little importance or interest to us.”
Mr. J. Ellis, one of the firm of Messrs. John Brown & Co.,
steel and iron works, employing about 3,000 men and boys, part of whose
operations, namely, iron and heavier steel work, goes on night and day
by relays, states “that in the heavier steel work one or two boys are employed
to a score or two men.” Their concern employs upwards of 500 boys under
18, of whom about 1/3 or 170 are under the age of 13. With reference to
the proposed alteration of the law, Mr. Ellis says:
“I do not think it would be very objectionable to require that no person under the age of
18 should work more than 12 hours in the 24. But we do not think that any
line could be drawn over the age of 12, at which boys could be dispensed
with for night-work. But we would sooner be prevented from employing boys
under the age of 13, or even so high as 14, at all, than not be allowed
to employ boys that we do have at night. Those boys who work in the day
sets must take their turn in the night sets also, because the men could
not work in the night sets only; it would ruin their health.... We think,
however, that night-work in alternate weeks is no harm.”
(Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, on the other hand, in conformity with the interest of their
business, considered that periodically changed night-labour might possibly
do more harm than continual night-labour.)
“We find the men who do it, as
well as the others who do other work only by day.... Our objections to
not allowing boys under 18 to work at night, would be on account of the
increase of expense, but this is the only reason.”
(What cynical naïveté!)
“We think that the increase would be more than the trade, with due regard
to its being successfully carried out, could fairly bear. (What mealy-mouthed
phraseology!) Labour is scarce here, and might fall short if there were
such a regulation.” (i.e., Ellis Brown & Co. might fall into
the fatal perplexity of being obliged to pay labour-power its full value.)

The “Cyclops Steel and Iron Works,” of Messrs. Cammell & Co.,
are concocted on the same large scale as those of the above-mentioned John
Brown & Co. The managing director had handed in his evidence to the
Government Commissioner, Mr. White, in writing. Later he found it convenient
to suppress the MS. when it had been returned to him for revision. Mr.
White, however, has a good memory. He remembered quite clearly that for
the Messrs. Cyclops the forbidding of the night-labour of children and
young persons “would be impossible, it would be tantamount to stopping
their works,” and yet their business employs little more than
6% of boys under 18, and less than 1% under 13.
On the same subject Mr. E. F. Sanderson, of the firm of Sanderson,
Bros., & Co., steel rolling-mills and forges, Attercliffe, says:
“Great difficulty would be caused by preventing boys under 18 from working at
night. The chief would be the increase of cost from employing men instead
of boys. I cannot say what this would be, but probably it would not be
enough to enable the manufacturers to raise the price of steel, and consequently
it would fall on them, as of course the men (what queer-headed folk!) would
refuse to pay it.”
Mr. Sanderson does not know how much he pays the children,
but
“perhaps the younger boys get from 4s. to 5s. a week.... The boys’
work is of a kind for which the strength of the boys is generally (‘generally,’
of course not always) quite sufficient, and consequently there would be
no gain in the greater strength of the men to counterbalance the loss,
or it would be only in the few cases in which the metal is heavy. The men
would not like so well not to have boys under them, as men would be less
obedient. Besides, boys must begin young to learn the trade. Leaving day-work
alone open to boys would not answer this purpose.”
And why not? Why could
not boys learn their handicraft in the day-time? Your reason?
“Owing to the men working days and nights in alternate weeks, the men would be separated
half the time from their boys, and would lose half the profit which they
make from them. The training which they give to an apprentice is considered
as part of the return for the boys’ labour, and thus enables the man to
get it at a cheaper rate. Each man would want half of this profit.”
In other words, Messrs. Sanderson would have to pay part of the wages of the
adult men out of their own pockets instead of by the night-work of the
boys. Messrs. Sanderson’s profit would thus fall to some extent, and this
is the good Sandersonian reason why boys cannot learn their handicraft
in the day. In addition to this, it would throw
night-labour on those who worked instead of the boys, which they would
not be able to stand. The difficulties in fact would be so great that they
would very likely lead to the giving up of night-work altogether, and “as
far as the work itself is concerned,” says E. F. Sanderson, “this would
suit as well, but —” But Messrs. Sanderson have something else to make
besides steel. Steel-making is simply a pretext for surplus-value making.
The smelting furnaces, rolling-mills, &c., the buildings, machinery,
iron, coal, &c., have something more to do than transform themselves
into steel. They are there to absorb surplus-labour, and naturally absorb
more in 24 hours than in 12. In fact they give, by grace of
God and law, the Sandersons a cheque on the working-time of a certain number
of hands for all the 24 hours of the day, and they lose their character
as capital, are therefore a pure loss for the Sandersons, as soon as their
function of absorbing labour is interrupted.
“But then there would be the
loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle half the time, and to
get through the amount of work which we are able to do on the present system,
we should have to double our premises and plant, which would double the
outlay.”
But why should these Sandersons pretend to a privilege not enjoyed
by the other capitalists who only work during the day, and whose buildings,
machinery, raw material, therefore lie “idle” during the night? E. F. Sanderson
answers in the name of all the Sandersons:
“It is true that there is this
loss from machinery lying idle in those manufactories in which work only
goes on by day. But the use of furnaces would involve a further loss in
our case. If they were kept up there would be a waste of fuel (instead
of, as now, a waste of the living substance of the workers), and if they
were not, there would be loss of time in laying the fires and getting the
heat up (whilst the loss of sleeping time, even to children of 8 is a gain
of working-time for the Sanderson tribe), and the furnaces themselves would
suffer from the changes of temperature.” (Whilst those same furnaces suffer
nothing from the day and night change of labour.)
SECTION 5
THE STRUGGLE FOR A NORMAL WORKING-DAY.
COMPULSORY LAWS FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE WORKING-DAY FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE 14TH TO THE END OF THE 17TH CENTURY
“What is a working-day? What is the length of time
during which capital may consume the labour-power whose daily value it
buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the working-time necessary
for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to
these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours,
with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power
absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the
labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that
therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to
be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual
development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse,
for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time
of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!)
— moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger
for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the
merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for
growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the
time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles
over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production
itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production,
as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It
reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment
of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of
an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal
maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the
working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power,
no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to
determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares
nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is
simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent
in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s
life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing
it of its fertility.
The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production
of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with
the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power
by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development
and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this
labour-power itself. It extends the labourer’s
time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.
But the value of the labour-power includes the value of the commodities
necessary for the reproduction of the worker, or for the keeping up of
the working-class. If then the unnatural extension of the working-day,
that capital necessarily strives after in its unmeasured passion for self-expansion,
shortens the length of life of the individual labourer, and therefore the
duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced at
a more rapid rate and the sum of the expenses for the reproduction of labour-power
will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its value to be reproduced
every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would
seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction
of a normal working-day.
The slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he
loses his slave, he loses capital that can only be restored by new outlay
in the slave-mart.
But “the rice-grounds of Georgia, or the swamps of the
Mississippi may be fatally injurious to the human constitution; but the
waste of human life which the cultivation of these districts necessitates,
is not so great that it cannot be repaired from the teeming preserves of
Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations of economy, moreover, which, under
a natural system, afford some security for humane treatment by identifying
the master’s interest with the slave’s preservation, when once trading
in slaves is practiced, become reasons for racking to the uttermost the
toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied from foreign
preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than
its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management,
in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which
takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost
amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in tropical culture,
where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that
negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the
West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth,
that has engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this
day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes,
that we see in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting
and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of
its numbers every year.”
Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur
[It is of you that the story is told – Horace]. For slave-trade read
labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural
districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We heard
how over-work thinned the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless,
the London labour-market is always over-stocked with German and other candidates
for death in the bakeries. Pottery, as we saw, is one of the shortest-lived
industries. Is there any want therefore of potters? Josiah Wedgwood, the
inventor of modern pottery, himself originally a common workman, said in
1785 before the House of Commons that the whole trade employed from 15,000
to 20,000 people. In the year 1861 the population
alone of the town centres of this industry in Great Britain numbered 101,302.
“The cotton trade has existed for ninety years.... It has existed for three
generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during
that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.”
No doubt in certain epochs of feverish activity the labour-market
shows significant gaps. In 1834, e.g. But then the manufacturers
proposed to the Poor Law Commissioners that they should send the “surplus-population”
of the agricultural districts to the north, with the explanation “that
the manufacturers would absorb and use it up.”
Agents were appointed with the consent of the Poor Law Commissioners. ...
An office was set up in Manchester, to which lists were sent of
those workpeople in the agricultural districts wanting employment, and
their names were registered in books. The manufacturers attended at these
offices, and selected such persons as they chose; when they had selected
such persons as their ‘wants required’, they gave instructions to have
them forwarded to Manchester, and they were sent, ticketed like bales of
goods, by canals, or with carriers, others tramping on the road, and many
of them were found on the way lost and half-starved. This system had grown
up unto a regular trade. This House will hardly believe it, but I tell
them, that this traffic in human flesh was as well kept up, they were in
effect as regularly sold to these [Manchester] manufacturers as slaves
are sold to the cotton-grower in the United States.... In 1860, ‘the cotton
trade was at its zenith.’ ... The manufacturers again found that they were
short of hands.... They applied to the ‘flesh agents, as they are called.
Those agents sent to the southern downs of England, to the pastures of
Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in
Wiltshire, but they sought in vain. The surplus-population was ‘absorbed.’”
The Bury Guardian said, on the completion of the French treaty,
that “10,000 additional hands could be absorbed by Lancashire, and that
30,000 or 40,000 will be needed.” After the “flesh agents and sub-agents”
had in vain sought through the agricultural districts,
“a deputation came
up to London, and waited on the right hon. gentleman [Mr. Villiers, President
of the Poor Law Board] with a view of obtaining poor children from certain
union houses for the mills of Lancashire.”
What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant
excess of population, i.e., an excess in relation to the momentary requirements
of surplus-labour-absorbing capital, although this excess is made up of
generations of human beings stunted, short-lived, swiftly replacing each
other, plucked, so to say, before maturity. And,
indeed, experience shows to the intelligent observer with what swiftness
and grip the capitalist mode of production, dating, historically speaking,
only from yesterday, has seized the vital power of the people by the very
root — shows how the degeneration of the industrial population is only
retarded by the constant absorption of primitive and physically uncorrupted
elements from the country — shows how even the country labourers, in spite
of fresh air and the principle of natural selection, that works so powerfully
amongst them, and only permits the survival of the strongest, are already
beginning to die off. Capital that has such good
reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround
it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming
degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by
the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stockjobbing swindle
every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every
one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself
has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après
moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every
capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of
life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.
To the out-cry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature
death, the torture of over-work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us
since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all
this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual
capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist
production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every
individual capitalist.
The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of centuries
of struggle between capitalist and labourer. The history of this
struggle shows two opposed tendencies. Compare, e.g., the English factory
legislation of our time with the English labour Statutes from the 14th
century to well into the middle of the 18th. Whilst the modern Factory Acts compulsorily shortened the working-day, the earlier
statutes tried to lengthen it by compulsion. Of course the pretensions
of capital in embryo — when, beginning to grow, it secures the right of
absorbing a quantum sufficit [sufficient quantity] of surplus-labour, not merely by the
force of economic relations, but by the help of the State — appear very
modest when put face to face with the concessions that, growling and struggling,
it has to make in its adult condition. It takes centuries ere the “free”
labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees,
i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his
active life, his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries
of life, his birth-right for a mess of pottage. Hence it is natural that
the lengthening of the working-day, which capital, from the middle of the
14th to the end of the 17th century, tries to impose by State-measures
on adult labourers, approximately coincides with the shortening of the
working-day which, in the second half of the 19th century, has here and
there been effected by the State to prevent the coining of children’s blood
into capital. That which to-day, e.g., in the State of Massachusetts,
until recently the freest State of the North-American Republic, has been
proclaimed as the statutory limit of the labour of children under 12, was
in England, even in the middle of the 17th century, the normal working-day
of able-bodied artisans, robust labourers, athletic blacksmiths.
The first “Statute of Labourers” (23 Edward III., 1349) found
its immediate pretext (not its cause, for legislation of this kind lasts
centuries after the pretext for it has disappeared) in the great plague
that decimated the people, so that, as a Tory writer says, “The difficulty
of getting men to work on reasonable terms (i.e., at a price that
left their employers a reasonable quantity of surplus-labour) grew to such
a height as to be quite intolerable.” Reasonable
wages were, therefore, fixed by law as well as the limits of
the working-day. The latter point, the only one that here interests us,
is repeated in the Statute of 1496 (Henry VII.). The working-day for all
artificers and field labourers from March to September ought, according
to this statute (which, however, could not be enforced), to last from 5
in the morning to between 7 and 8 in the evening. But the meal-times consist
of 1 hour for breakfast, 1½ hours for dinner, and ½ an hour for “noon-meate,”
i.e., exactly twice as much as under the factory acts now in force. In winter, work was to last from 5 in the morning until dark, with the
same intervals. A statute of Elizabeth of 1562 leaves the length of the
working-day for all labourers “hired for daily or weekly wage” untouched,
but aims at limiting the intervals to 2½ hours in the summer, or to
2 in the winter. Dinner is only to last 1 hour, and the “afternoon-sleep
of half an hour” is only allowed between the middle of May and the middle
of August. For every hour of absence 1d. is to be subtracted from the wage.
In practice, however, the conditions were much more favourable to the labourers
than in the statute-book. William Petty, the father of Political Economy,
and to some extent the founder of Statistics, says in a work that he published
in the last third of the 17th century:
“Labouring-men (then meaning field-labourers)
work 10 hours per diem, and make 20 meals per week, viz., 3 a day for working-days,
and 2 on Sundays; whereby it is plain, that if they could fast on Friday
nights, and dine in one hour and an half, whereas they take two, from eleven
to one; thereby thus working 1/20 more, and spending 1/20 less, the above-mentioned
(tax) might be raised.”
Was not Dr. Andrew Ure
right in crying down the 12 hours’ bill of 1833 as a retrogression to the
times of the dark ages? It is true these regulations contained in the statute
mentioned by Petty, apply also to apprentices. But the condition of child-labour,
even at the end of the 17th century, is seen from the following complaint:
“’Tis not their practice (in Germany) as with us in this kingdom, to bind
an apprentice for seven years; three or four is their common
standard: and the reason is, because they are educated from their cradle
to something of employment, which renders them the more apt and docile,
and consequently the more capable of attaining to a ripeness and quicker
proficiency in business. Whereas our youth, here in England, being bred
to nothing before they come to be apprentices, make a very slow progress
and require much longer time wherein to reach the perfection of accomplished
artists.”
Still, during the greater part of the 18th century, up to the
epoch of Modern Industry and machinism, capital in England had not succeeded
in seizing for itself, by the payment of the weekly value of labour-power,
the whole week of the labourer, with the exception, however, of the agricultural
labourers. The fact that they could live for a whole week on the wage of
four days, did not appear to the labourers a sufficient reason that they
should work the other two days for the capitalist. One party of English
economists, in the interest of capital, denounces this obstinacy in the
most violent manner, another party defends the labourers. Let us listen,
e.g., to the contest between Postlethwayt whose Dictionary of Trade
then had the same reputation as the kindred works of MacCulloch and MacGregor
to-day, and the author (already quoted) of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce.”

Postlethwayt says among other things:
“We cannot put an end to those few observations, without noticing that trite remark in the
mouth of too many; that if the industrious poor can obtain enough to maintain
themselves in five days, they will not work the whole six. Whence they
infer the necessity of even the necessaries of life being made dear by
taxes, or any other means, to compel the working artisan and manufacturer
to labour the whole six days in the week, without ceasing. I must beg leave
to differ in sentiment from those great politicians, who contend for the
perpetual slavery of the working people of this kingdom; they forget the
vulgar adage, all work and no play. Have not the English boasted of the
ingenuity and dexterity of her working artists and manufacturers which
have heretofore given credit and reputation to British wares in general?
What has this been owing to? To nothing more probably than the relaxation
of the working people in their own way. Were they obliged to toil the year
round, the whole six days in the week, in a repetition of the same work,
might it not blunt their ingenuity, and render them stupid instead of alert
and dexterous; and might not our workmen lose their reputation instead
of maintaining it by such eternal slavery? ... And what sort of workmanship
could we expect from such hard-driven animals? ... Many of them will execute
as much work in four days as a Frenchman will in five or six. But if Englishmen
are to be eternal drudges, ‘tis to be feared they will degenerate below
the Frenchmen. As our people are famed for bravery in war, do we not say
that it is owing to good English roast beef and pudding in their bellies,
as well as their constitutional spirit of liberty? And why may not the
superior ingenuity and dexterity of, our artists and manufacturers, be
owing to that freedom and liberty to direct themselves in their own way,
and I hope we shall never have them deprived of such privileges and that
good living from whence their ingenuity no less than their courage may
proceed.”
Thereupon the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” replies:
“If the making of every seventh day an holiday is supposed to be of divine institution, as it implies the appropriating the other six days to labour” (he means capital as we shall soon see) “surely it will not be thought cruel to enforce
it .... That mankind in general, are naturally inclined to ease and indolence,
we fatally experience to be true, from the conduct of our manufacturing
populace, who do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week,
unless provisions happen to be very dear.... Put all the necessaries of the poor under one denomination; for instance, call them all wheat, or
suppose that ... the bushel of wheat shall cost five shillings and that
he (a manufacturer) earns a shilling by his labour, he then would be obliged
to work five days only in a week. If the bushel of wheat should cost but
four shillings, he would be obliged to work but four days; but as wages
in this kingdom are much higher in proportion to the price of necessaries
... the manufacturer, who labours four days, has a surplus of money to
live idle with the rest of the week . ... I hope I have said enough to
make it appear that the moderate labour of six days in a week is no slavery.
Our labouring people do this, and to all appearance are the happiest of
all our labouring poor, but the Dutch do this in
manufactures, and appear to be a very happy people. The French do so, when
holidays do not intervene. But our populace have
adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege
of being more free and independent than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of our troops, may be of some
use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better
for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should never) think
themselves independent of their superiors.... It is extremely dangerous
to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven
parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property.
The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented
to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.”

To this end, and for “extirpating idleness debauchery and excess,” promoting a spirit of industry, “lowering the price of labour
in our manufactories, and easing the lands of the heavy burden of poor’s
rates,” our “faithful Eckart” of capital proposes this approved device:
to shut up such labourers as become dependent on public support,
in a word, paupers, in “an ideal workhouse.” Such ideal workhouse
must be made a “House of Terror,” and not an asylum for the poor, “where
they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where
they do but little work.” In this “House of Terror,” this “ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing
proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours
of neat-labour.”
Twelve working-hours daily in the Ideal Workhouse, in the “House
of Terror” of 1770! 63 years later, in 1833, when the English Parliament
reduced the working-day for children of 13 to 18, in four branches of industry
to 12 full hours, the judgment day of English Industry had dawned! In 1852,
when Louis Bonaparte sought to secure his position with the bourgeoisie
by tampering with the legal working-day, the French working people cried
out with one voice “the law that limits the working-day to 12 hours is
the one good that has remained to us of the legislation of the Republic!”
At Zürich the work of children over 10, is limited to 12 hours; in Aargau in 1862, the work of children between 13
and 16, was reduced from 12½ to 12 hours; in Austria in 1860, for children
between 14 and 16, the same reduction was made. “What a progress,” since 1770! Macaulay would shout with exultation!
The “House of Terror” for paupers of which the capitalistic soul
of 1770 only dreamed, was realised a few years later in the shape of a
gigantic “Workhouse” for the industrial worker himself. It is called the
Factory. And the ideal this time fades before the reality.
SECTION 6
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING-DAY.
COMPULSORY LIMITATION BY LAW OF THE WORKING-TIME.
THE ENGLISH FACTORY ACTS, 1833 TO 1864
After capital had taken centuries in extending the
working-day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit
of the natural day of 12 hours, there followed
on the birth of machinism and modern industry in the last third of the
18th century, a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity
and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night,
were broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, of rustic simplicity
in the old statutes, became so confused that an English judge, as late
as 1860, needed a quite Talmudic sagacity to explain “judicially” what
was day and what was night. Capital celebrated
its orgies.
As soon as the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and
turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its
senses, its resistance began, and first in the native land of machinism,
in England. For 30 years, however, the concessions conquered by the workpeople
were purely nominal. Parliament passed 5 labour Laws between 1802 and 1833,
but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrying out, for the
requisite officials, &c.
They remained a dead letter. “The fact is, that prior to the Act
of 1833, young persons and children were worked all night, all day, or
both ad libitum.”
A normal working-day for modern industry only dates from
the Factory Act of 1833, which included cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories.
Nothing is more characteristic of the spirit of capital than the history
of the English Factory Acts from 1833 to 1864.
The Act of 1833 declares the ordinary factory working-day to be
from half-past five in the morning to half-past eight in the evening and
within these limits, a period of 15 hours, it is lawful to employ young
persons (i.e., persons between 13 and 18 years of age), at any time
of the day, provided no one individual young person should work more than
12 hours in any one day, except in certain cases especially provided for.
The 6th section of the Act provided. “That there shall be allowed in the
course of every day not less than one and a half hours for meals to every
such person restricted as hereinbefore provided.” The employment of children
under 9, with exceptions mentioned later was forbidden; the work of children
between 9 and 13 was limited to 8 hours a day, night-work, i.e.,
according to this Act, work between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., was forbidden
for all persons between 9 and 18.
The law-makers were so far from wishing to trench on the freedom
of capital to exploit adult labour-power, or, as they called it, “the freedom
of labour,” that they created a special system in order to prevent the
Factory Acts from having a consequence so outrageous.
“The great evil of the factory system as at present conducted,”
says the first report of the Central Board of the Commission of June 28th
1833, “has appeared to us to be that it entails the necessity of continuing
the labour of children to the utmost length of that of the adults. The
only remedy for this evil, short of the limitation of the labour of adults
which would, in our opinion, create an evil greater than that which is
sought to be remedied, appears to be the plan of working double sets of
children.”
... Under the name of System of Relays, this “plan” was therefore
carried out, so that, e.g., from 5.30 a.m. until 1.30 in the afternoon,
one set of children between 9 and 13, and from 1.30 p.m. to 8.30 in the
evening another set were “put to,” &c.
In order to reward the manufacturers for having, in the most barefaced
way, ignored all the Acts as to children’s labour passed during the last
twenty-two years, the pill was yet further gilded for them. Parliament
decreed that after March 1st, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1st
1835, no child under 12, and after March 1st, 1836, no child under 13 was
to work more than eight hours in a factory. This “liberalism,” so full
of consideration for “capital,” was the more noteworthy as. Dr. Farre,
Sir A. Carlisle, Sir B. Brodie, Sir C. Bell, Mr. Guthrie, &c., in a
word, the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in London, had declared
in their evidence before the House of Commons, that there was danger in
delay. Dr. Farre expressed himself still more coarsely.
“Legislation is necessary for the prevention of death, in any form in which it can be
prematurely inflicted, and certainly this (i.e., the factory method) must
be viewed as a most cruel mode of inflicting it.”
That same “reformed” Parliament, which in its delicate consideration
for the manufacturers, condemned children under 13, for years to come,
to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory Hell, on the other hand, in
the Emancipation Act, which also administered freedom drop by drop, forbade
the planters, from the outset, to work any negro slave more than 45 hours
a week.
But in no wise conciliated, capital now began a noisy agitation
that went on for several years. It turned chiefly on the age of those who,
under the name of children, were limited to 8 hours’ work, and were subject
to a certain amount of compulsory education. According to capitalistic
anthropology, the age of childhood ended at 10, or at the outside, at 11.
The more nearly the time approached for the coming into full force of the
Factory Act, the fatal year 1836, the more wildly raged the mob of manufacturers.
They managed, in fact, to intimidate the government to such an extent that
in 1835 it proposed to lower the limit of the age of childhood from 13
to 12. In the meantime the pressure from without grew more threatening.
Courage failed the House of Commons. It refused to throw children of 13
under the Juggernaut Car of capital for more than 8 hours a day, and the
Act of 1833 came into full operation. It remained unaltered until June,
1844.
In the ten years during which it regulated factory work, first
in part, and then entirely, the official reports of the factory inspectors
teem with complaints as to the impossibility of putting the Act into force.
As the law of 1833 left it optional with the lords of capital during the
15 hours, from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., to make every “young person,” and
“every child” begin, break off, resume, or end his 12 or 8 hours at any
moment they liked, and also permitted them to assign to different persons,
different times for meals, these gentlemen soon discovered a new “system
of relays,” by which the labour-horses were not changed at fixed stations,
but were constantly re-harnessed at changing stations. We do not pause
longer on the beauty of this system, as we shall have to return to it later.
But this much is clear at the first glance: that this system annulled the
whole Factory Act, not only in the spirit, but in the letter. How could
factory inspectors, with this complex bookkeeping in respect to each individual
child or young person, enforce the legally determined work-time and the
granting of the legal mealtimes? In a great many of the factories, the
old brutalities soon blossomed out again unpunished. In an interview with
the Home Secretary (1844), the factory inspectors demonstrated the impossibility
of any control under the newly invented relay system. In the meantime, however, circumstances had greatly changed. The factory hands, especially since 1838, had made the Ten Hours’ Bill their economic,
as they had made the Charter their political, election-cry. Some of the manufacturers, even, who had managed their factories in conformity with the Act of 1833, overwhelmed Parliament with memorials on the immoral competition
of their false brethren whom greater impudence, or more fortunate local
circumstances, enabled to break the law. Moreover, however much the individual
manufacturer might give the rein to his old lust for gain, the spokesmen
and political leaders of the manufacturing class ordered a change of front
and of speech towards the workpeople. They had entered upon the contest
for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and needed the workers to help them to
victory. They promised therefore, not only a double-sized loaf of bread,
but the enactment of the Ten Hours’ Bill in the Free-trade millennium.
Thus they still less dared to oppose a measure intended only to make the law of 1833 a reality. Threatened in their holiest
interest, the rent of land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic indignation
against the “nefarious practices” of their foes.
This was the origin of the additional Factory Act of June 7th,
1844. It came into effect on September 10th, 1844. It places under protection
a new category of workers, viz., the women over 18. They were placed in
every respect on the same footing as the young persons, their work time
limited to twelve hours, their night-labour forbidden, &c. For the
first time, legislation saw itself compelled to control directly and officially
the labour of adults. In the Factory Report of 1844-1845, it is said with
irony:
“No instances have come to my knowledge of adult women having expressed
any regret at their rights being thus far interfered with.” The working-time of children under 13 was reduced to 6½, and in certain circumstances to 7 hours a-day.
To get rid of the abuses of the “spurious relay system,” the law
established besides others the following important regulations: —
“That
the hours of work of children and young persons shall be reckoned from
the time when any child or young person shall begin to work in the morning.”
So that if A, e.g., begins work at 8 in the morning, and B at
10, B’s work-day must nevertheless end at the same hour as A’s. “The time
shall be regulated by a public clock,” for example, the nearest railway
clock, by which the factory clock is to be set. The occupier is to hang
up a “legible” printed notice stating the hours for the beginning and ending
of work and the times allowed for the several meals. Children beginning
work before 12 noon may not be again employed after I p.m. The afternoon
shift must therefore consist of other children than those employed in the
morning. Of the hour and a half for meal-times,
“one hour thereof at the
least shall be given before three of the clock in the afternoon ... and
at the same period of the day. No child or young person shall be employed
more than five hours before I p.m. without an interval for meal-time of
at least 30 minutes. No child or young person [or female] shall be employed
or allowed to remain in any room in which any manufacturing process is
then [i.e., at mealtimes] carried on,” &c.
It has been seen that these minutiae, which, with military uniformity,
regulate by stroke of the clock the times, limits, pauses of the work were
not at all the products of Parliamentary fancy. They developed gradually
out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production.
Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the State,
were the result of a long struggle of classes. One of their first consequences
was that in practice the working-day of the adult males in factories became
subject to the same limitations, since in most processes of production
the co-operation of the children. young persons, and women is indispensable.
On the whole, therefore, during the period from 1844 to 1847, the 12 hours’
working-day became general and uniform in all branches of industry under
the Factory Act.
The manufacturers, however, did not allow this “progress” without
a compensating “retrogression.” At their instigation the House of Commons
reduced the minimum age for exploitable children from 9 to 8, in order
to assure that additional supply of factory children which is due to capitalists,
according to divine and human law.
The years 1846-47 are epoch-making in the economic history of
England. The Repeal of the Corn Laws, and of the duties on cotton and other
raw material; Free-trade proclaimed as the guiding star of legislation;
in a word, the arrival of the millennium. On the other hand, in the same
years, the Chartist movement and the 10 hours’ agitation reached their
highest point. They found allies in the Tories panting for revenge.
Despite the fanatical opposition of the army of perjured Free-traders,
with Bright and Cobden at their head, the Ten Hours’ Bill, struggled for
so long, went through Parliament.
The new Factory Act of June 8th, 1847, enacted that on July 1st,
1847, there should be a preliminary shortening of the working-day for “young
persons” (from 13 to 18), and all females to 11 hours, but that on May
1st, 1848, there should be a definite limitation of the working-day to
10 hours. In other respects, the Act only amended and completed the Acts
of 1833 and 1844.
Capital now entered upon a preliminary campaign in order to hinder
the Act from coming into full force on May 1st, 1848. And the workers themselves,
under the presence that they had been taught by experience, were to help
in the destruction of their own work. The moment was cleverly chosen.
“It must be remembered, too, that there has been more than two years of great
suffering (in consequence of the terrible crisis of 1846-47) among the
factory operatives, from many mills having worked short time, and many
being altogether closed. A considerable number of the operatives must therefore
be in very narrow circumstances many, it is to be feared, in debt; so that
it might fairly have been presumed that at the present time they would
prefer working the longer time, in order to make up for past losses, perhaps
to pay off debts, or get their furniture out of pawn, or replace that sold,
or to get a new supply of clothes for themselves and their families.”
The manufacturers tried to aggravate the natural effect of these
circumstances by a general reduction of wages by 10%. This was done so
to say, to celebrate the inauguration of the new Free-trade era. Then followed
a further reduction of 8 1/3% as soon as the working-day was shortened
to 11, and a reduction of double that amount as soon as it was finally
shortened to 10 hours. Wherever, therefore, circumstances allowed it, a
reduction of wages of at least 25% took place.
Under such favourably prepared conditions the agitation among the factory
workers for the repeal of the Act of 1847 was begun. Neither lies, bribery,
nor threats were spared in this attempt. But all was in vain. Concerning
the half-dozen petitions in which workpeople were made to complain of “their
oppression by the Act,” the petitioners themselves declared under oral
examination, that their signatures had been extorted from them. “They felt
themselves oppressed, but not exactly by the Factory Act.”
But if the manufacturers did not succeed in making the workpeople speak as they wished, they themselves shrieked all the louder in press and Parliament in the name of the workpeople. They denounced the Factory Inspectors as a kind of revolutionary commissioners like those
of the French National Convention ruthlessly sacrificing the unhappy factory
workers to their humanitarian crotchet. This manoeuvre also failed. Factory
Inspector Leonard Horner conducted in his own person, and through his sub-inspectors,
many examinations of witnesses in the factories of Lancashire. About 70%
of the workpeople examined declared in favour of 10 hours, a much smaller
percentage in favour of 11, and an altogether insignificant minority for
the old 12 hours.
Another “friendly” dodge was to make the adult males work 12 to
15 hours, and then to blazon abroad this fact as the best proof of what
the proletariat desired in its heart of hearts. But the “ruthless” Factory
Inspector Leonard Horner was again to the fore. The majority of the “over-times”
declared:
“They would much prefer working ten hours for less wages, but
that they had no choice; that so many were out of employment (so many spinners
getting very low wages by having to work as piecers, being unable to do
better), that if they refused to work the longer time, others would immediately
get their places, so that it was a question with them of agreeing to work
the longer time, or of being thrown out of employment altogether.”
The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the
Ten Hours’ Act came into force May 1st, 1848. But meanwhile the fiasco
of the Chartist party whose leaders were imprisoned, and whose organisation
was dismembered, had shaken the confidence of the English working-class
in its own strength. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and
its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions
of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves
and shop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition,
priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry
for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society.
The working-class was everywhere proclaimed, placed under a ban, under
a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to
restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt not only against the
Ten Hours’ Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833
had aimed at restricting in some measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power.
It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years
with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper because
the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his “hands.”
To understand that which follows we must remember that the Factory
Acts of 1833, 1844, and 1847 were all three in force so far as the one
did not amend the other: that not one of these limited the working-day
of the male worker over 18, and that since 1833 the 15 hours from 5.30
a.m. to 8.30 p.m. had remained the legal “day,” within the limits of which
at first the 12, and later the 10 hours’ labour of young persons and women
had to be performed under the prescribed conditions.
The manufacturers began by here and there discharging a part of,
in many cases half of the young persons and women employed by them, and
then, for the adult males, restoring the almost obsolete night-work. The
Ten Hours’ Act, they cried, leaves no other alternative.
Their second step dealt with the legal pauses for meals. Let us
hear the Factory Inspectors.
“Since the restriction of the hours of work
to ten, the factory occupiers maintain, although they have not yet practically
gone the whole length, that supposing the hours of work to be from 9 a.m.
to 7 p.m. they fulfil the provisions of the statutes by allowing an hour
before 9 a.m. and half an hour after 7 p.m. [for meals]. In some cases
they now allow an hour, or half an hour for dinner, insisting at the same
time, that they are not bound to allow any part of the hour and a half
in the course of the factory working-day.” The
manufacturers maintained therefore that the scrupulously strict provisions
of the Act of 1844 with regard to meal-times only gave the operatives permission
to eat and drink before coming into, and after leaving the factory — i.e.,
at home. And why should not the workpeople eat their dinner before 9 in
the morning? The crown lawyers, however, decided that the prescribed meal-times
“must be in the interval during the working-hours, and that it will not
be lawful to work for 10 hours continuously, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., without
any interval.”
After these pleasant demonstrations, Capital preluded its revolt
by a step which agreed with the letter of the law of 1844, and
was therefore legal.
The Act of 1844 certainly prohibited the employment after 1 p.m.
of such children, from 8 to 13, as had been employed before noon. But it
did not regulate in any way the 6½ hours’ work of the children whose
work-time began at 12 midday or later. Children of 8 might, if they began
work at noon, be employed from 12 to 1, 1 hour; from 2 to 4 in the afternoon,
2 hours; from 5 to 8.30 in the evening, 3½ hours; in all, the legal
6½ hours. Or better still. In order to make their work coincide with
that of the adult male labourers up to 8.30 p.m., the manufacturers only
had to give them no work till 2 in the afternoon, they could then keep
them in the factory without intermission till 8.30 in the evening.
“And it is now expressly admitted that the practice exists in England from the
desire of mill-owners to have their machinery at work for more than 10
hours a-day, to keep the children at work with male adults after all the
young persons and women have left, and until 8.30 p.m. if the factory-owners
choose.”
Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:
“My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”
In fact, according to statistics laid before the House of Commons on July
26th, 1850, in spite of all protests, on July 15th, 1850, 3,742 children
were subjected to this “practice” in 257 factories. Still, this was not enough. The Lynx eye of Capital discovered that the Act of 1844 did not allow 5 hours’ work before mid-day without a pause
of at least 30 minutes for refreshment, but prescribed nothing of the kind
for work after mid-day. Therefore, it claimed and obtained the enjoyment
not only of making children of 8 drudge without intermission from 2 to
8.30 p.m., but also of making them hunger during that time.
“Ay, his heart.
So says the bond.”
This Shylock-clinging
to the letter of the law of 1844, so far as it regulated children’s labour, was but to lead up to an open revolt against the same law, so far as it regulated the labour of “young persons and women.” It will be remembered that the abolition of the “false relay system” was
the chief aim and object of that law. The masters began their revolt with
the simple declaration that the sections of the Act of 1844 which prohibited
the ad libitum use of young persons and women in such short fractions
of the day of 15 hours as the employer chose, were “comparatively harmless”
so long as the work-time was fixed at 12 hours. But under the Ten Hours’
Act they were a “grievous hardship.” They informed the inspectors in the coolest manner that they should place themselves above the letter of the law, and re-introduce the old system on their own account. They were acting in the interests of the ill-advised operatives themselves, “in order to be able to pay them higher wages.”
"This was the only possible plan by which to maintain, under the Ten Hours’ Act, the industrial supremacy of Great Britain.” “Perhaps it may be a little difficult to detect irregularities under the relay system;
but what of that? Is the great manufacturing interest of this country to
be treated as a secondary matter in order to save some little trouble to
Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors of Factories?”
All these shifts naturally were of no avail. The Factory Inspectors
appealed to the Law Courts. But soon such a cloud of dust in the way of
petitions from the masters overwhelmed the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey,
that in a circular of August 5th, 1848, he recommends the inspectors not
“to lay informations against mill-owners for a breach of the letter of
the Act, or for employment of young persons by relays in cases in which
there is no reason to believe that such young persons have been actually
employed for a longer period than that sanctioned by law.” Hereupon, Factory
Inspector J. Stuart allowed the so-called relay system during the 15 hours
of the factory day throughout Scotland, where it soon flourished again
as of old. The English Factory Inspectors, on the other hand, declared
that the Home Secretary had no power dictatorially to suspend the law,
and continued their legal proceedings against the pro-slavery rebellion.
But what was the good of summoning the capitalists when
the Courts in this case the county magistrates — Cobbett’s “Great Unpaid”
— acquitted them? In these tribunals, the masters sat in judgment on themselves
An example. One Eskrigge, cotton-spinner, of the firm of Kershaw, Leese,
& Co., had laid before the Factory Inspector of his district the scheme
of a relay system intended for his mill. Receiving a refusal, he at first kept quiet. A few months later, an individual named Robinson, also a cotton-spinner, and if not his Man Friday, at all events related to Eskrigge, appeared before the borough magistrates of Stockport on a charge of introducing
the identical plan of relays invented by Eskrigge. Four Justices sat, among
them three cottonspinners, at their head this same inevitable Eskrigge.
Eskrigge acquitted Robinson, and now was of opinion that what was right
for Robinson was fair for Eskrigge. Supported by his own legal decision,
he introduced the system at once into his own factory. Of course, the composition of this tribunal was in itself a violation of the law.
These judicial farces, exclaims Inspector Howell, “urgently call for a remedy — either that the law should be so altered as to be made to conform to these decisions, or that it should
be administered by a less fallible tribunal, whose decisions would conform
to the law ... when these cases are brought forward. I long for a stipendiary
magistrate.”
The crown lawyers declared the masters’ interpretation of the
Act of 1848 absurd. But the Saviours of Society would not allow themselves
to be turned from their purpose. Leonard Horner reports,
“Having endeavoured
to enforce the Act ... by ten prosecutions in seven magisterial divisions,
and having been supported by the magistrates in one case only ... I considered
it useless to prosecute more for this evasion of the law. That part of
the Act of 1848 which was framed for securing uniformity in the hours of
work, ... is thus no longer in force in my district (Lancashire). Neither
have the sub-inspectors or myself any means of satisfying ourselves, when
we inspect a mill working by shifts, that the young persons and women are
not working more than 10 hours a-day.... In a return of the 30th April,
... of millowners working by shifts, the number amounts to 114, and has
been for some time rapidly increasing. In general, the time of working
the mill is extended to 13½ hours’ from 6 a.m. to 7½ p.m., .... in
some instances it amounts to 15 hours, from 5½ a.m. to 8½ p.m.”

Already, in December, 1848, Leonard Horner had
a list of 65 manufacturers and 29 overlookers who unanimously declared
that no system of supervision could, under this relay system, prevent enormous
over-work. Now, the same children and young persons were shifted from the spinning-room to the weaving-room, now, during 15
hours, from one factory to another. How was it
possible to control a system which,
“under the guise of relays, is some
one of the many plans for shuffling ‘the hands’ about in endless variety,
and shifting the hours of work and of rest for different individuals throughout
the day, so that you may never have one complete set of hands working together
in the same room at the same time.”
But altogether independently of actual over-work, this so-called
relay system was an offspring of capitalistic fantasy, such as Fourier,
in his humorous sketches of “Courtes Seances,” has never surpassed, except
that the “attraction of labour” was changed into the attraction of capital.
Look, for example, at those schemes of the masters which the “respectable”
press praised as models of “what a reasonable degree of care and method
can accomplish.” The personnel of the workpeople was sometimes divided
into from 12 to 14 categories, which themselves constantly changed and
recharged their constituent parts. During the 15 hours of the factory day,
capital dragged in the labourer now for 30 minutes, now for an hour, and
then pushed him out again, to drag him into the factory and to thrust him
out afresh, hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time,
without ever losing hold of him until the full 10 hours’ work was done.
As on the stage, the same persons had to appear in turns in the different
scenes of the different acts. But as an actor during the whole course of
the play belongs to the stage, so the operatives, during 15 hours, belonged
to the factory, without reckoning the time for going and coming. Thus the
hours of rest were turned into hours of enforced idleness, which drove
the youths to the pot-house, and the girls to the brothel. At every new
trick that the capitalist, from day to day, hit upon for keeping his machinery
going 12 or 15 hours without increasing the number of his hands, the worker
had to swallow his meals now in this fragment of time, now in that. At
the time of the 10 hours’ agitation, the masters cried out that the working
mob petitioned in the hope of obtaining 12 hours’ wages for 10 hours’ work.
Now they reversed the medal. They paid 10 hours’ wages for 12 or 15 hours’ lordship over labour-power. This
was the gist of the matter, this the masters’ interpretation of the 10
hours’ law! These were the same unctuous Free-traders, perspiring with
the love of humanity, who for full 10 years, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation,
had preached to the operatives, by a reckoning of pounds, shillings, and
pence, that with free importation of corn, and with the means possessed
by English industry, 10 hours’ labour would be quite enough to enrich the
capitalists. This revolt of capital, after two
years was at last crowned with victory by a decision of one of the four
highest Courts of Justice in England, the Court of Exchequer, which in
a case brought before it on February 8th, 1850, decided that the manufacturers
were certainly acting against the sense of the Act of 1844, but that this
Act itself contained certain words that rendered it meaningless. “By this
decision, the Ten Hours’ Act was abolished.”
A crowd of masters, who until then had been afraid of using the relay system
for young persons and women, now took it up heart and soul.
But on this apparently decisive victory of capital, followed at
once a revulsion. The workpeople had hitherto offered a passive, although
inflexible and unremitting resistance. They now protested in Lancashire
and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The pretended Ten Hours’ Act was
thus simple humbug, parliamentary cheating, had never existed! The Factory
Inspectors urgently warned the Government that the antagonism of classes
had arrived at an incredible tension. Some of the masters themselves murmured:
“On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition
of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in
Yorkshire, another in Lancashire, one law in one parish of Lancashire,
another in its immediate neighbourhood. The manufacturer in large towns
could evade the law, the manufacturer in country districts could not find
the people necessary for the relay system, still less for the shifting
of hands from one factory to another,” &c.
And the first birthright
of capital is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists.
Under these circumstances a compromise between masters and men was
effected that received the seal of Parliament in the additional Factory
Act of August 5th, 1850. The working-day for “young persons and women,”
was raised from 10 to 10 — hours for the first five days of the week,
and shortened to 7½ on the Saturday. The work was to go on between 6
a.m. and 6 p.m., with pauses of not less than
1½ hours for meal-times, these meal-times to be allowed at one and the
same time for all, and conformably to the conditions of 1844. By this an
end was put to the relay system once for all.
For children’s labour, the Act of 1844 remained in force.
One set of masters, this time as before, secured to itself special
seigneurial rights over the children of the proletariat. These were the
silk manufacturers. In 1833 they had howled out in threatening fashion,
“if the liberty of working children of any age for 10 hours a day were
taken away, it would stop their works.” It would be impossible for them to buy a sufficient number of children over 13.
They extorted the privilege they desired. The pretext was shown on subsequent
investigation to be a deliberate lie. It did
not, however, prevent them, during 10 years, from spinning silk 10 hours
a day out of the blood of little children who had to be placed upon stools
for the performance of their work. The Act of
1844 certainly “robbed” them of the “liberty” of employing children under
11 longer than 6½ hours a day. But it secured to them, on the other
hand, the privilege of working children between 11 and 13, 10 hours a day,
and of annulling in their case the education made compulsory for all other
factory children. This time the pretext was
“the delicate texture of the
fabric in which they were employed, requiring a lightness of touch, only
to be acquired by their early introduction to these factories.”
The children were slaughtered out-and-out for the sake of their delicate fingers, as in Southern Russia the horned cattle for the sake of their
hide and tallow. At length, in 1850, the privilege granted in 1844, was
limited to the departments of silk-twisting and silk-winding. But here,
to make amends to capital bereft of its “freedom,” the work-time for children
from 11 to 13 was raised from 10 to 10½ hours. Pretext: “Labour
in silk mills was lighter than in mills
for other fabrics, and less likely in other respects also to be
prejudicial to health.” Official medical inquiries proved afterwards that, on the contrary,
“the average death-rate is exceedingly
high in the silk districts and amongst the female part of the population
is higher even than it is in the cotton districts of Lancashire.”
Despite the protests of the Factory Inspector, renewed every 6 months, the mischief continues to this hour.
The Act of 1850 changed the 15 hours’ time from 6 a.m. to 8.30
p.m., into the 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for “young persons and women”
only. It did not, therefore, affect children who could always be employed
for half an hour before and 2½ hours after this period, provided the whole
of their labour did not exceed 6½ hours. Whilst the bill was under discussion,
the Factory Inspectors laid before Parliament statistics of the infamous
abuses due to this anomaly. To no purpose. In the background lurked the
intention of screwing up, during prosperous years, the working-day of adult
males to 15 hours by the aid of the children. The experience of the three
following years showed that such an attempt must come to grief against
the resistance of the adult male operatives. The Act of 1850 was therefore
finally completed in 1853 by forbidding the “employment of children in
the morning before and in the evening after young persons and women.” Henceforth
with a few exceptions the Factory Act of 1850 regulated the working-day
of all workers in the branches of industry that come under it. Since the passing of the first Factory Act half a century had elapsed.
Factory legislation for the first time went beyond its original
sphere in the “Printworks’ Act of 1845.” The displeasure with which capital
received this new “extravagance” speaks through every line of the Act.
It limits the working-day for children from 8 to 13, and for women to 16
hours, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., without any legal pause for meal-times.
It allows males over 13 to be worked at will day and night. It is a Parliamentary abortion.
However, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those
great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation
of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853
to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory
workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal
limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war
of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with
the branches of exploitation still “free.” The
Pharisees of “Political Economy” now proclaimed the discernment of the
necessity of a legally fixed working-day as a characteristic new discovery
of their “science.” It will be easily understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled
to the inevitable, the power of resistance of capital gradually weakened,
whilst at the same time the power of attack of the working-class grew with
the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately interested
in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid advance since 1860.
The dye-works and bleach-works all came under the Factory Act
of 1850 in 1860; lace and stocking manufactures in 1861.
In consequence of the first report of the Commission on the employment
of children (1863) the same fate was shared by the manufacturers of all
earthenwares (not merely pottery), Lucifer-matches, percussion caps, cartridges,
carpets, fustian-cutting, and many processes included under the name of
“finishing.” In the year 1863 bleaching in the open air and baking were placed under special Acts, by which, in the former, the labour of young persons and women during the night-time (from 8 in the evening to 6 in the morning), and in the latter, the employment of journeymen
bakers under 18, between 9 in the evening and 5 in the morning were forbidden.
We shall return to the later proposals of the same Commission, which threatened
to deprive of their “freedom” all the important branches of English Industry,
with the exception of agriculture, mines, and the means of transport.
SECTION 7
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING-DAY.
RE-ACTION OF THE ENGLISH FACTORY ACTS ON OTHER COUNTRIES
The reader will bear in mind that the production of
surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus-labour, is the specific end
and aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production, quite apart from
any changes in the mode of production, which may arise from
the subordination of labour to capital. He will remember that as far as
we have at present gone only the independent labourer, and therefore only
the labourer legally qualified to act for himself, enters as a vendor of
a commodity into a contract with the capitalist. If, therefore, in our
historical sketch, on the one hand, modern industry, on the other, the
labour of those who are physically and legally minors, play important parts,
the former was to us only a special department, and the latter only a specially
striking example of labour exploitation. Without, however, anticipating
the subsequent development of our inquiry, from the mere connexion of the
historic facts before us it follows:
First. The passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless
extension of the working-day, is first gratified in the industries earliest
revolutionised by water-power, steam, and machinery, in those first creations
of the modern mode of production, cotton, wool, flax, and silk spinning,
and weaving. The changes in the material mode of production, and the corresponding
changes in the social relations of the producers gave rise first to an extravagance beyond all bounds, and then in opposition to this, called forth a control on the part of Society which legally limits,
regulates, and makes uniform the working-day and its pauses. This control
appears, therefore, during the first half of the nineteenth century simply
as exceptional legislation. As soon as this primitive dominion of the new mode of production was conquered, it was found that,
in the meantime, not only had many other branches of production been made
to adopt the same factory system, but that manufactures with more or less
obsolete methods, such as potteries, glass-making, &c., that old-fashioned
handicrafts, like baking, and, finally, even that the so-called domestic
industries, such as nail-making, had long since fallen as completely under capitalist exploitation as the factories themselves.
Legislation was, therefore, compelled to gradually get rid of its exceptional
character, or where, as in England, it proceeds after the manner of the
Roman Casuists, to declare any house in which work was done to be a factory.

Second. The history of the regulation of the working-day
in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others
in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer,
the labourer as “free” vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production
has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance.
The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted
civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the
working-class. As the contest takes place in the arena of modern industry,
it first breaks out in the home of that industry — England. The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally, as their theorists were the
first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of capital. Hence, the philosopher of the Factory, Ure, denounces as an ineffable disgrace to the English working-class that they inscribed “the slavery of the Factory
Acts” on the banner which they bore against capital, manfully striving
for “perfect freedom of labour.”
France limps slowly behind England. The February revolution was
necessary to bring into the world the 12 hours’ law, which is much more deficient than its English original. For all that, the French revolutionary method has its special advantages. It
once for all commands the same limit to the working-day in all shops and
factories without distinction, whilst English legislation reluctantly yields
to the pressure of circumstances, now on this point, now on that, and is
getting lost in a hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory enactments.
On the other hand, the French law proclaims as
a principle that which in England was only won in the name of children,
minors, and women, and has been only recently for the first time claimed
as a general right.
In the United States of North America, every independent movement
of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the
Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the
black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once
arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation,
that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of
labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared:
“The first and great
necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalistic
slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal
working-day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put
forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.”
At the same time, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, on the proposition of the London General Council, resolved that “the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition
without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must
prove abortive... the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit
of the working-day.”
Thus the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic,
that had grown instinctively out of the conditions of production themselves,
endorsed the words of the English Factory Inspector, R. J. Saunders
“Further
steps towards a reformation of society can never be carried out with any
hope of success, unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed
limit strictly enforced.”
It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process
of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of
the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities,
dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist
his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed
of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was
no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power
is the time for which he is forced to sell it,
that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there
is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a
law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers
from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their
families into slavery and death. In place of
the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes
the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make
clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own
begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! – Virgil]
Footnotes
1. “A day’s labour is vague, it may be long
or short.” (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce, Containing Observations on
Taxes, &c.” London. 1770, p. 73.)
2. This question is far more important
than the celebrated question of Sir Robert Peel to the Birmingham Chamber
of Commerce: What is a pound? A question that could only have been proposed,
because Peel was as much in the dark as to the nature of money as the “little
shilling men” of Birmingham.
3. “It is the aim of the capitalist to
obtain with his expended capital the greatest possible quantity of labour
(d’obtenir du capital dépense la plus forte somme de travail possible).”
J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil. “Traité théorique et pratique des
entreprises industrielles.” 2nd ed. Paris, 1857, p. 63.
4. “An hour’s labour lost in a day is
a prodigious injury to a commercial State.... There is a very great consumption
of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among
the manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the
most fatal of consumptions.” “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c.,”
p. 47, and 15 3.
5. “Si le manouvrier libre prend un instant
de repos, l’économie sordide qui le suit des yeux avec inquiétude,
prétend qu’il la vole.” [If the free labourer allows himself an instant of rest, the base and petty management, which follows him with wary eyes, claims he is stealing from it.] N. Linguet, “Théorie des Lois Civiles.
&c.” London, 1767, t. II., p. 466.
6. During the great strike of the London
builders, 1860-61, for the reduction of the working-day to 9 hours, their
Committee published a manifesto that contained, to some extent, the plea
of our worker. The manifesto alludes, not without irony, to the fact, that
the greatest profit-monger amongst the building masters, a certain Sir
M. Peto, was in the odour of sanctity (This same Peto, after 1867, came
to an end a la Strousberg.)
7. “Those who labour ... in reality feed
both the pensioners ... [called the rich] and themselves.” (Edmund Burke,
l.c., p. 2.)
8. Niebuhr in his “Roman History” says
very naively: “It is evident that works like the Etruscan, which in their
ruins astound us, pre-suppose in little (!) states lords and vassals.”
Sismondi says far more to the purpose that “Brussels lace” pre-supposes
wage-lords and wage-slaves.
9. “One cannot see these unfortunates
(in the gold mines between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Arabia) who cannot even
have their bodies clean, or their nakedness clothed, without pitying their
miserable lot. There is no indulgence, no forbearance for the sick, the
feeble, the aged, for woman’s weakness. All must, forced by blows, work
on until death puts an end to their sufferings and their distress.” (“Diod.
Sic. Bibl. Hist.,” lib. 2, c. 13.)
10. That which follows refers to the
situation in the Rumanian provinces before the change effected since the
Crimean war.
11. This holds likewise for Germany,
and especially for Prussia east of the Elbe. In the 15th century the German
peasant was nearly everywhere a man, who, whilst subject to certain rents
paid in produce and labour was otherwise at least practically free. The
German colonists in Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, and Eastern Prussia,
were even legally acknowledged as free men. The victory of the nobility
in the peasants’ war put an end to that. Not only were the conquered South
German peasants again enslaved. From the middle of the 16th century the
peasants of Eastern Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia, and soon
after the free peasants of Schleswig-Holstein were degraded to the condition
of serfs. (Maurer, Fronhöfe iv. vol., — Meitzen, “Der Boden des preussischen
Staats” — Hanssen, “Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein.” — F.
E.)
12. Further details are to be found in E.
Regnault’s “Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes,”
Paris, 1855.
13. “In general and within certain limits,
exceeding the medium size of their kind, is evidence of the prosperity
of organic beings. As to man, his bodily height lessens if his due growth
is interfered with, either by physical or local conditions. In all European
countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the
medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service,
has diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry
in France was 165 centimetres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the
law of March 21, 1832, 156 cm.; on the average in France more than half
are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military
standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 cm. It is now 155. In Prussia it
is 157. According to the statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette,
May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is, that in Prussia
out of 1,000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because
of deficiency in height, and 399 because of bodily defects.... Berlin in
1858 could not provide its contingent of recruits, it was 156 men short.”
J. von Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie.
1862,” 7th Ed., vol. 1, pp. 117, 118.
14. The history of the Factory Act of
1850 will be found in the course of this chapter.
15. I only touch here and there on the
period from the beginning of modern industry in England to 1845. For this
period I refer the reader to “Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,”
[Condition of the Working Class in England]
von Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845. How completely Engels understood the
nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports,
Reports on Mines, &c., that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully
he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most superficial
comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children’s Employment
Commission, published 18 to 20 years later (1863-1867). These deal especially
with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to
1862, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced. Here, then, little
or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions painted
by Engels. I borrow my examples chiefly from the Free-trade period after
1848, that age of paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the
great firm of Free-trade, blatant as ignorant, tell such fabulous tales.
For the rest England figures here in the foreground because she is the
classic representative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous
set of official statistics of the things we are considering.
16. “Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L.
Horner, Inspector of Factories,” in Factories Regulation Acts. Ordered by
the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859, pp. 4, 5.
17. Reports of the Inspector of Factories
for the half year. October, 1856, p. 35.
18. Reports, &c., 30th April, 1858,
p. 9.
19. Reports, &c., l.c., p. 10.
20. Reports &c., l.c., p. 25.
21. Reports &c., for the half year
ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Reports, &c., 31st October,
1862, pp. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during
the last half year 1863. Cf Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 1863,
p. 7.
22. Reports, &c., October 31st,
1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of manufacturers
given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption
in factory labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning
of June, 1836, information reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (Yorkshire)
that the owners of 8 large mills in the neighbourhood of Batley had violated
the Factory Acts. Some of these gentlemen were accused of having kept at
work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4
p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for
meals and one hour for sleep at midnight. And these children had to do
this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the “shoddyhole,” as the hole is called,
in which the woollen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere
of dust, shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth
continually with handkerchiefs for the protection of his lungs! The accused
gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they were too
scrupulously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great
compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep,
but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. The quaker gentlemen
were mulcted in £20. Dryden anticipated these gentry:
Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity,
That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie,
That look’d like Lent, and had the holy leer,
And durst not sin! before he said his prayer!”
23. Rep., 31st Oct., 1856, p. 34.
24. l.c., p. 35.
25. l.c., p. 48.
26. l.c., p. 48.
27. l.c., p. 48.
28. l.c., p. 48.
29. Report of the Insp. &c., 30th
April 1860, p. 56.
30. This is the official expression
both in the factories and in the reports.
31. “The cupidity of mill-owners whose
cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by those perpetrated
by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold.” John
Wade, “History of the Middle and Working Classes,” 3rd Ed. London, 1835,
p. 114. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political
Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some
parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a
great extent, a shameless plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden’s “The State of
the Poor,” London, 1797.
32. Daily Telegraph, 17th January,
1860.
33. Cf. F. Engels “Lage, etc.” pp. 249-51.
34. Children’s Employment Commission.
First report., etc., 1863. Evidence. pp. 16, 19, 18.
35. Public Health, 3rd report, etc.,
pp. 102, 104, 105.
36. Child. Empl. Comm. I. Report, p.
24.
37. Children’s Employment Commission,
p. 22, and xi.
38. l.c., p. xlviii.
39. l.c., p. liv.
40. This is not to be taken in the same
sense as our surplus-labour time. These gentlemen consider 10½ hours
of labour as the normal working-day, which includes of course the normal
surplus-labour. After this begins “overtime” which is paid a little better.
It will be seen later that the labour expended during the so-called normal
day is paid below its value, so that the overtime is simply a capitalist
trick in order to extort more surplus-labour, which it would still be,
even if the labour-power expended during the normal working-day were properly
paid.
41. l.c., Evidence, pp. 123, 124, 125,
140, and 54.
42. Alum finely powdered, or mixed with
salt, is a normal article of commerce bearing the significant name of “bakers’
stuff.”
43. Soot is a well-known and very energetic
form of carbon, and forms a manure that capitalistic chimney-sweeps sell
to English farmers. Now in 1862 the British juryman had in a law-suit to
decide whether soot, with which, unknown to the buyer, 90% of dust and
sand are mixed, is genuine soot in the commercial sense or adulterated
soot in the legal sense. The “amis du commerce” [friends of commerce] decided it to be genuine
commercial soot, and non-suited the plaintiff farmer, who had in addition
to pay the costs of the suit.
44. The French chemist, Chevallier,
in his treatise on the “sophistications” of commodities, enumerates for
many of the 600 or more articles which he passes in review, 10, 20, 30
different methods of adulteration. He adds that he does not know all the
methods and does not mention all that he knows. He gives 6 kinds of adulteration
of sugar, 9 of olive oil, 10 of butter, 12 of salt, 19 of milk, 20 of bread,
23 of brandy, 24 of meal, 28 of chocolate, 30 of wine, 32 of coffee, etc.
Even God Almighty does not escape this fate. See Rouard de Card, “On the
Falsifications of the materials of the Sacrament.” (“De la falsification
des substances sacramentelles,” Paris, 1856.)
45. “Report, &c., relative to the
grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers, &c., London, 1862,”
and “Second Report, &c., London, 1863.”
46. l.c., First Report, &c., p.
vi.
47. l.c., p. Ixxi.
48. George Read, “The History of Baking,”
London, 1848, p. 16.
49. Report (First) &c. Evidence
of the “full-priced” baker Cheeseman, p. 108.
50. George Read, l.c. At the end of
the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries the factors (agents) that
crowded into every possible trade were still denounced as “public nuisances.”
Thus the Grand Jury at the quarter session of the Justices of the Peace
for the County of Somerset, addressed a presentment to the Lower House
which, among other things, states, “that these factors of Blackwell Hall
are a Public Nuisance and Prejudice to the Clothing Trade, and ought to
be put down as a Nuisance.” “The Case of our English Wool., &c.,” London,
1685, pp. 6, 7.
51. First Report, &c.
52. Report of Committee on the Baking
Trade in Ireland for 1861.
53. l.c.
54. Public meeting of agricultural labourers
at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, January 5th, 1866. (See Workman’s Advocate,
January 13th, 1866.) The formation since the close of 1865 of a Trades’
Union among the agricultural labourers at first in Scotland is a historic
event. In one of the most oppressed agricultural districts of England,
Buckinghamshire, the labourers, in March, 1867, made a great strike for
the raising of their weekly wage from 9-10 shillings to 12 shillings. (It
will be seen from the preceding passage that the movement of the English
agricultural proletariat, entirely crushed since the suppression of its
violent manifestations after 1830, and especially since the introduction
of the new Poor Laws, begins again in the sixties, until it becomes finally
epoch-making in 1872. I return to this in the 2nd volume, as well as to
the Blue books that have appeared since 1867 on the position of the English
land labourers. Addendum to the 3rd ed.)
55. Reynolds’ Newspaper, January,
1866. — Every week this same paper has, under the sensational headings,
“Fearful and fatal accidents,” “Appalling tragedies,” &c., a whole
list of fresh railway catastrophes. On these an employee on the North Staffordshire
line comments: “Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver
and fireman of a locomotive engine are not continually on the look-out.
How can that be expected from a man who has been at such work for 29 or
30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest. The following is an
example which is of very frequent occurrence: — One fireman commenced
work on the Monday morning at a very early hour. When he had finished what
is called a day’s work, he had been on duty 14 hours 50 minutes. Before
he had time to get his tea, he was again called on for duty.... The next
time he finished he had been on duty 14 hours 25 minutes, making a total
of 29 hours 15 minutes without intermission. The rest of the week’s work
was made up as follows: — Wednesday, 15 hours; Thursday, 15 hours 35 minutes;
Friday, 14½ hours; Saturday, 14 hours 10 minutes, making a total for the
week of 88 hours 30 minutes. Now, sir, fancy his astonishment on being
paid 6 1/4 days for the whole. Thinking it was a mistake, he applied to
the time-keeper,... and inquired what they considered a day’s work, and
was told 13 hours for a goods man (i.e., 78 hours).... He then asked
for what he had made over and above the 78 hours per week, but was refused.
However, he was at last told they would give him another quarter, i.e.,
10d.,” l.c., 4th February. 1866.
56. Cf F. Engels, l.c., pp. 253, 254.
57. Dr. Letheby, Consulting Physician
of the Board of Health, declared: “The minimum of air for each adult ought
to be in a sleeping room 300, and in a dwelling room 500 cubic feet.” Dr.
Richardson, Senior Physician to one of the London Hospitals: “With needlewomen
of all kinds, including milliners, dressmakers, and ordinary seamstresses,
there are three miseries — over-work, deficient air, and either deficient
food or deficient digestion.... Needlework, in the main, ... is infinitely
better adapted to women than to men. But the mischiefs of the trade, in
the metropolis especially, are that it is monopolised by some twenty-six
capitalists, who, under the advantages that spring from capital, can bring
in capital to force economy out of labour. This power tells throughout
the whole class. If a dressmaker can get a little circle of customers,
such is the competition that, in her home, she must work to the death to
hold together, and this same over-work she must of necessity inflict on
any who may assist her. If she fail, or do not try independently, she must
join an establishment, where her labour is not less, but where her money
is safe. Placed thus, she becomes a mere slave, tossed about with the variations
of society. Now at home, in one room, starving, or near to it, then engaged
15, 16, aye, even 18 hours out of the 24, in an air that is scarcely tolerable,
and on food which, even if it be good, cannot be digested in the absence
of pure air. On these victims, consumption, which is purely a disease of
bad air, feeds.” Dr. Richardson: “Work and Over-work,” in “Social Science
Review,” 18th July, 1863.
58. Morning Star, 23rd June,
1863. — The Times made use of the circumstance to defend the American
slave-owners against Bright, &c. “Very many of us think,” says a leader
of July 2nd, 1863, “that, while we work our own young women to death, using
the scourge of starvation, instead of the crack of the whip, as the instrument
of compulsion, we have scarcely a right to hound on fire and slaughter
against families who were born slave-owners, and who, at least, feed their
slaves well, and work them lightly.” In the same manner, the Standard,
a Tory organ, fell foul of the Rev. Newman Hall: “He excommunicated
the slave-owners, but prays with the fine folk who, without remorse, make
the omnibus drivers and conductors of London, &c., work 16 hours a-day
for the wages of a dog.” Finally, spake the oracle, Thomas Carlyle, of
whom I wrote, in 1850, “Zum Teufel ist der Genius, der Kultus ist geblieben.”
[“In the cult of genius ... The cult remains,” paraphrasing Schiller]
In a short parable, he reduces the one great event of contemporary history,
the American Civil War, to this level, that the Peter of the North wants
to break the head of the Paul of the South with all his might, because
the Peter of the North hires his labour by the day, and the Paul of the
South hires his by the life. (Macmillan’s Magazine. Ilias Americana in
nuce. August, 1863.) Thus, the bubble of Tory sympathy for the urban workers
— by no means for the rural — has burst at last. The sum of all is —
slavery!
59. Dr. Richardson, l.c.
60. Children’s Employment Commission.
Third Report. London, 1864, pp. iv., v., vi.
61. “Both in Staffordshire and in South
Wales young girls and women are employed on the pit banks and on the coke
heaps, not only by day but also by night. This practice has been often
noticed in Reports presented to Parliament, as being attended with great
and notorious evils. These females employed with the men, hardly distinguished
from them in their dress, and begrimed with dirt and smoke, are exposed
to the deterioration of character, arising from the loss of self-respect,
which can hardly fail to follow from their unfeminine occupation.” (l.
c., 194, p. xxvi. Cf. Fourth Report (1865), 61, p. xiii.) It is the same
in glass-works.
62. A steel manufacturer who employs
children in night-labour remarked: “It seems but natural that boys who
work at night cannot sleep and get proper rest by day, but will be running
about.” (l.c., Fourth Report, 63, p. xiii.) On the importance of sunlight
for the maintenance and growth of the body, a physician writes: “Light
also acts upon the tissues of the body directly in hardening them and supporting
their elasticity. The muscles of animals, when they are deprived of a proper
amount of light, become soft and inelastic, the nervous power loses its
tone from defective stimulation, and the elaboration of all growth seems
to be perverted.... In the case of children, constant access to plenty
of light during the day, and to the direct rays of the sun for a part of
it, is most essential to health. Light assists in the elaboration of good
plastic blood, and hardens the fibre after it has been laid down. It also
acts as a stimulus upon the organs of sight, and by this means brings about
more activity in the various cerebral functions.” Dr. W. Strange, Senior
Physician of the Worcester General Hospital, from whose work on “Health”
(1864) this passage is taken, writes in a letter to Mr. White, one of the
commissioners: “I have had opportunities formerly, when in Lancashire,
of observing the effects of nightwork upon children, and I have no hesitation
in saying, contrary to what some employers were fond of asserting, those
children who were subjected to it soon suffered in their health.” (l.c.,
284., p. 55.) That such a question should furnish the material of serious
controversy, shows plainly how capitalist production acts on the brain-functions
of capitalists and their retainers.
63. l.c., 57, p. xii.
64. l.c.. Fourth Report (1865). 58.
p. xii.
65. l.c.
66. l.c., p. xiii. The degree of culture
of these “labour-powers” must naturally be such as appears in the following
dialogues with one of the commissioners: Jeremiah Haynes, age 12 — “Four
times four is 8; 4 fours are 16. A king is him that has all the money and
gold. We have a king (told it is a Queen), they call her the Princess
Alexandra. Told that she married the Queen’s son. The Queen’s son is the
Princess Alexandra. A Princess is a man.” William Turner, age 12 — “Don’t
live in England. Think it is a country, but didn’t know before.” John Morris,
age 14 — “Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people
was drownded but one, heard say that one was a little bird.” William Smith
age 15 — “God made man, man made woman.” Edward Taylor, age 15 — “Do
not know of London.” Henry Matthewman, age 17 — “Had been to chapel, but
missed a good many times lately. One name that they preached about was
Jesus Christ, but I cannot say any others, and I cannot tell anything about
him. He was not killed, but died like other people. He was not the same
as other people in some ways, because he was religious in some ways and
others isn’t.” (l.c., p. xv.) “The devil is a good person. I don’t know
where he lives.” “Christ was a wicked man.” “This girl spelt God as dog,
and did not know the name of the queen.” (“Ch. Employment Comm. V. Report,
1866” p. 55, n. 278.) The same system obtains in the glass and paper works
as in the metallurgical, already cited. In the paper factories, where the
paper is made by machinery, night-work is the rule for all processes, except
rag-sorting. In some cases night-work, by relays, is carried on incessantly
through the whole week, usually from Sunday night until midnight of the following
Saturday. Those who are on day-work work 5 days of 12, and 1 day of 18
hours; those on night-work 5 nights of 12, and 1 of 6 hours in each week.
In other cases each set works 24 hours consecutively on alternate days,
one set working 6 hours on Monday, and 18 on Saturday to make up the 24
hours. In other cases an intermediate system prevails, by which all employed
on the paper-making machinery work 15 or 16 hours every day in the week.
This system, says Commissioner Lord, “seems to combine all the evils of
both the 12 hours’ and the 24 hours’ relays.” Children under 13, young
persons under 18, and women, work under this night system. Sometimes under
the 12 hours’ system they are obliged, on account of the non-appearance
of those that ought to relieve them, to work a double turn of 24 hours.
The evidence proves that boys and girls very often work overtime, which,
not unfrequently, extends to 24 or even 36 hours of uninterrupted toil.
In the continuous and unvarying process of glazing are found girls of 12
who work the whole month 14 hours a day, “without any regular relief or
cessation beyond 2 or, at most, 3 breaks of half an hour each for meals.”
In some mills, where regular night-work has been entirely given up, over-work
goes on to a terrible extent, “and that often in the dirtiest, and in the
hottest, and in the most monotonous of the various processes.” (“Ch. Employment
Comm. Report IV., 1865,” p. xxxviii, and xxxix.)
67. Fourth Report, &c.. 1865, 79,
p. xvi.
68. l.c., 80. p. xvi.
69. l.c., 82. p. xvii.
70. In our reflecting and reasoning
age a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything,
no matter how bad or how crazy. Everything in the world that has been done
wrong has been done wrong for the very best of reasons. (Hegel, l.c.,
p. 249 )
71. l.c., 85, p. xvii. To similar tender
scruples of the glass manufacturers that regular meal-times for the children
are impossible because as a consequence a certain quantity of heat, radiated
by the furnaces, would be “a pure loss” or “wasted,” Commissioner White
makes answer. His answer is unlike that of Ure, Senior, &c., and their
puny German plagiarists à la Roscher who are touched by the “abstinence,”
“self-denial,” “saving,” of the capitalists in the expenditure of their
gold, and by their Timur-Tamerlanish prodigality of human life! “A certain
amount of heat beyond what is usual at present might also be going to waste,
if meal-times were secured in these cases, but it seems likely not equal
in money-value to the waste of animal power now going on in glass-houses
throughout the kingdom from growing boys not having enough quiet time to
eat their meals at ease, with a little rest afterwards for digestion.”
(l.c., p. xiv.) And this in the year of progress 1865! Without considering
the expenditure of strength in lifting and carrying, such a child, in the
sheds where bottle and flint glass are made, walks during the performance
of his work 15-20 miles in every 6 hours! And the work often lasts 14 or
15 hours! In many of these glass works, as in the Moscow spinning mills,
the system of 6 hours’ relays is in force. “During the working part of
the week six hours is the utmost unbroken period ever attained at any one
time for rest, and out of this has to come the time spent in coming and
going to and from work, washing, dressing, and meals, leaving a very short
period indeed for rest, and none for fresh air and play, unless at the
expense of the sleep necessary for young boys, especially at such hot and
fatiguing work.... Even the short sleep is obviously liable to be broken
by a boy having to wake himself if it is night, or by the noise, if it
is day.” Mr. White gives cases where a boy worked 36 consecutive hours;
others where boys of 12 drudged on until 2 in the morning, and then slept
in the works till 5 a.m. (3 hours!) only to resume their work. “The amount
of work,” say Tremenheere and Tufnell, who drafted the general report,
“done by boys, youths, girls, and women, in the course of their daily or
nightly spell of labour, is certainly extraordinary.” (l.c., xliii. and
xliv.) Meanwhile, late by night, self-denying Mr. Glass-Capital, primed
with port-wine, reels out of his club homeward droning out idiotically.
“Britons never, never shall be slaves!”
72. In England even now occasionally
in rural districts a labourer is condemned to imprisonment for desecrating
the Sabbath, by working in his front garden. The same labourer is punished
for breach of contract if he remains away from his metal, paper, or glass
works on the Sunday, even if it be from a religious whim. The orthodox
Parliament will hear nothing of Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the process
of expanding capital. A memorial (August 1863), in which the London day-labourers
in fish and poultry shops asked for the abolition of Sunday labour, states
that their work lasts for the first 6 days of the week on an average 15
hours a-day, and on Sunday 8-10 hours. From this same memorial we learn
also that the delicate gourmands among the aristocratic hypocrites of Exeter
Hall, especially encourage this “Sunday labour.” These “holy ones,” so
zealous in cute curanda [in attending to their bodily pleasures],
show their Christianity by the humility
with which they bear the overwork, the privations, and the hunger of others.
Obsequium ventris istis (the labourers) perniciosius est
[Gluttony is more ruinous to their stomachs – paraphrase of Horace].
73. “We have given in our previous reports
the statements of several experienced manufacturers to the effect that
over-hours ... certainly tend prematurely to exhaust the working power
of the men.” (l.c., 64. p. xiii.)
74. Cairnes, “The Slave Power,” pp.
110. 111.
75. John Ward: “The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent,”
London, 1843, p. 42.
76. Ferrand’s Speech in the House of
Commons, 27th April, 1863.
77. “Those were the very words used by
the cotton manufacturers.” l.c.
78. l.c. Mr. Villiers, despite the
best of intentions on his part, was “legally” obliged to refuse the requests
of the manufacturers. These gentlemen, however, attained their end through
the obliging nature of the local poor law boards. Mr. A. Redgrave, Inspector
of Factories, asserts that this time the system under which orphans and
pauper children were treated “legally” as apprentices “was not accompanied
with the old abuses” (on these “abuses” see Engels, l.c.), although in
one case there certainly was “abuse of this system in respect to a number
of girls and young women brought from the agricultural districts of Scotland
into Lancashire and Cheshire.” Under this system the manufacturer entered
into a contract with the workhouse authorities for a certain period. He
fed, clothed and lodged the children, and gave them a small allowance of
money. A remark of Mr. Redgrave to be quoted directly seems strange, especially
if we consider that even among the years of prosperity of the English cotton
trade, the year 1860 stands unparalleled, and that, besides, wages were
exceptionally high. For this extraordinary demand for work had to contend
with the depopulation of Ireland, with unexampled emigration from the English
and Scotch agricultural districts to Australia and America, with an actual
diminution of the population in some of the English agricultural districts,
in consequence partly of an actual breakdown of the vital force of the
labourers, partly of the already effected dispersion of the disposable
population through the dealers in human flesh. Despite all this Mr. Redgrave
says: “This kind of labour, however, would only be sought after when none
other could be procured, for it is a high-priced labour. The ordinary wages
of a boy of 13 would be about 4s. per week, but to lodge, to clothe, to
feed, and to provide medical attendance and proper superintendence for
50 or 100 of these boys, and to set aside some remuneration for them, could
not be accomplished for 4s. a-head per week.” (Report of the Inspector
of Factories for 30th April, 1860, p. 27.) Mr. Redgrave forgets to tell
us how the labourer himself can do all this for his children out of their
4s. a-week wages, when the manufacturer cannot do it for the 50 or 100
children lodged, boarded, superintended all together. To guard against
false conclusions from the text, I ought here to remark that the English
cotton industry, since it was placed under the Factory Act of 1850 with
its regulations of labour-time, &c., must be regarded as the model
industry of England. The English cotton operative is in every respect better
off than his Continental companion in misery. “The Prussian factory operative
labours at least ten hours per week more than his English competitor, and
if employed at his own loom in his own house, his labour is not restricted
to even those additional hours. (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st October,
1855, p. 103.) Redgrave, the Factory Inspector mentioned above, after the
Industrial Exhibition in 1851, travelled on the Continent, especially in
France and Germany, for the purpose of inquiring into the conditions of
the factories. Of the Prussian operative he says: “He receives a remuneration
sufficient to procure the simple fare, and to supply the slender comforts
to which he has been accustomed ... he lives upon his coarse fare, and
works hard, wherein his position is subordinate to that of the English
operative.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.” 31st Oct., 1855, p. 85.)
79. The over-worked “die off with strange
rapidity; but the places of those who perish are instantly filled, and
a frequent change of persons makes no alteration in the scene.” (“England
and America.” London, 1833, vol. I, p. 55. By E. G. Wakefield.)
80. See “Public Health. Sixth Report
of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 1863.” Published in London
1864. This report deals especially with the agricultural labourers. “Sutherland
... is commonly represented as a highly improved county ... but ... recent
inquiry has discovered that even there, in districts once famous for fine
men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated into a meagre
and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hill sides fronting
the sea, the faces of their famished children are as pale as they could
be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley.” (W. Th. Thornton. “Overpopulation
and its Remedy.” l.c., pp. 74, 75.) They resemble in fact the 30,000 “gallant
Highlanders” whom Glasgow pigs together in its wynds and closes, with prostitutes
and thieves.
81. “But though the health of a population
is so important a fact of the national capital, we are afraid it must be
said that the class of employers of labour have not been the most forward
to guard and cherish this treasure.... The consideration of the health
of the operatives was forced upon the mill-owners.” (Times, November
5th, 1861.) “The men of the West Riding became the clothiers of mankind
... the health of the workpeople was sacrificed, and the lace in a few generations
must have degenerated. But a reaction set in. Lord Shaftesbury’s Bill limited
the hours of children’s labour,” &c. (“Report of the Registrar-General,”
for October 1861.)
82. We, therefore, find, e.g., that
in the beginning of 1863, 26 firms owning extensive potteries in Staffordshire,
amongst others, Josiah Wedgwood, & Sons, petition in a memorial for
“some legislative enactment.” Competition with other capitalists permits
them no voluntary limitation of working-time for children, &c. “Much
as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent
them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers. ... Taking all
these points into consideration, we have come to the conviction that some
legislative enactment is wanted.” (“Children’s Employment Comm.” Rep. I,
1863, p. 322.) Most recently a much more striking example offers. The rise
in the price of cotton during a period of feverish activity, had induced
the manufacturers in Blackburn to shorten, by mutual consent, the working-time
in their mills during a certain fixed period. This period terminated about
the end of November, 1871. Meanwhile, the wealthier manufacturers, who
combined spinning with weaving, used the diminution of production resulting
from this agreement, to extend their own business and thus to make great
profits at the expense of the small employers. The latter thereupon turned
in their extremity to the operatives, urged them earnestly to agitate for
the 9 hours’ system, and promised contributions in money to this end.
83. The labour Statutes, the like of
which were enacted at the same time in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere,
were first formally repealed in England in 1813, long after the changes
in methods of production had rendered them obsolete.
84. “No child under 12 years of age
shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment more than 10 hours
in one day.” General Statutes of Massachusetts, 63, ch. 12. (The various
Statutes were passed between 1836 and 1858.) “Labour performed during a
period of 10 hours on any day in all cotton, woollen, silk, paper, glass,
and flax factories, or in manufactories of iron and brass, shall be considered
a legal day’s labour. And be it enacted, that hereafter no minor engaged
in any factory shall be holden or required to work more than 10 hours in
any day,or 60 hours in any week; and that hereafter no minor shall be admitted
as a worker under the age of 10 years in any factory within this State.”
State of New Jersey. An Act to limit the hours of labour, &c., §
1 and 2. (Law of 18th March, 1851.) “No minor who has attained the age
of 12 years, and is under the age of 15 years, shall be employed in any
manufacturing establishment more than 11 hours in any one day, nor before
5 o’clock in the morning, nor after 7.30 in the evening.” (“Revised Statutes
of the State of Rhode Island,” &c., ch. 139, § 23, 1st July, 1857.)
85. “Sophisms of Free Trade.” 7th Ed.
London, 1850, p. 205, 9th Ed., p. 253. This same Tory, moreover, admits
that “Acts of Parliament regulating wages, but against the labourer and
in favour of the master, lasted for the long period of 464 years. Population
grew. These laws were then found, and really became, unnecessary and burdensome.”
(l.c., p. 206.)
86. In reference to this statute, J.
Wade with truth remarks: “From the statement above (i.e., with regard to
the statute) it appears that in 1496 the diet was considered equivalent
to one-third of the income of an artificer and one-half the income of a
labourer, which indicates a greater degree of independence among the working-classes
than prevails at present; for the board, both of labourers and artificers,
would now be reckoned at a much higher proportion of their wages.” (J.
Wade, “History of the Middle and Working Classes,” pp. 24, 25, and 577.)
The opinion that this difference is due to the difference in the price-relations
between food and clothing then and now is refuted by the most cursory glance
at “Chronicon Preciosum, &c.” By Bishop Fleetwood. 1st Ed., London, 1707;
2nd Ed., London, 1745.
87. W. Petty. “Political Anatomy of
Ireland, Verbum Sapienti,” 1672, Ed. 1691, p. 10.
88. “A Discourse on the necessity of
encouraging Mechanick Industry,” London, 1690, p. 13. Macaulay, who has
falsified English history in the interests of the Whigs and the bourgeoisie,
declares as follows: “The practice of setting children prematurely to work
... prevailed in the 17th century to an extent which, when compared with
the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible. At Norwich,
the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little creature of six years old
was thought fit for labour. Several writers of that time, and among them
some who were considered as eminently benevolent, mention with exultation
the fact that in that single city, boys and girls of very tender age create
wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve
thousand pounds a year. The more carefully we examine the history of the
past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that
our age has been fruitful of new social evils.... That which is new is
the intelligence and the humanity which remedies them.” (“History of England,”
vol. 1., p. 417.) Macaulay might have reported further that “extremely
well-disposed” amis du commerce in the 17th century, narrate with
“exultation” how in a poorhouse in Holland a child of four was employed,
and that this example of “vertu mise en pratique” [applied virtue]
passes muster in all the humanitarian works, à la Macaulay, to the time of Adam
Smith. It is true that with the substitution of manufacture for handicrafts,
traces of the exploitation of children begin to appear. This exploitation
existed always to a certain extent among peasants, and was the more developed,
the heavier the yoke pressing on the husbandman. The tendency of capital
is there unmistakably; but the facts themselves are still as isolated as
the phenomena of two-headed children. Hence they were noted “with exultation”
as especially worthy of remark and as wonders by the far-seeing “amis
du commerce,” and recommended as models for their own time and for posterity.
This same Scotch sycophant and fine talker, Macaulay, says: “We hear to-day
only of retrogression and see only progress.” What eyes, and especially
what ears!
89. Among the accusers of the workpeople,
the most angry is the anonymous author quoted in the text of “An Essay
on Trade and Commerce, containing Observations on Taxes, &c.,” London,
1770. He had already dealt with this subject in his earlier work: “Considerations
on Taxes.” London, 1765. On the same side follows Polonius Arthur Young,
the unutterable statistical prattler. Among the defenders of the working-classes
the foremost are: Jacob Vanderlint, in: “Money Answers all Things.” London,
1734 the Rev. Nathaniel Forster, D. D., in “An Enquiry into the Causes
of the Present High Price of Provisions,” London, 1767; Dr. Price, and
especially Postlethwayt, as well in the supplement to his “Universal Dictionary
of Trade and Commerce,” as in his “Great Bntain’s Commercial Interest explained
and improved.” 2nd Edition, 1755. The facts themselves are confirmed by
many other writers of the time, among others by Josiah Tucker.
90. Postlethwayt, l.c., “First Preliminary
Discourse,” p. 14.
91. “An Essay,” &c. He himself relates
on p. 96 wherein the “happiness” of the English agricultural labourer already
in 1770 consisted. “Their powers are always upon the stretch, they cannot
live cheaper than they do, nor work harder.”
92. Protestantism, by changing almost
all the traditional holidays into workdays, plays an important part in the
genesis of capital.
93. “An Essay,” 4c., pp. 15, 41, 96,
97, 55, 57, 69. — Jacob Vanderlint, as early as 1734, declared that the
secret of the out-cry of the capitalists as to the laziness of the working
people was simply that they claimed for the same wages 6 days’ labour instead
of 4.
94. l.c., p. 242.
95. l.c. “The French,” he says, “laugh
at our enthusiastic ideas of liberty.” l.c., p. 78.
96. “They especially objected to work
beyond the 12 hours per day, because the law which fixed those hours, is
the only good which remains to them of the legislation of the Republic.”
(“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.”, 31 st October, 1856, p. 80.) The French Twelve
Hours’ Bill of September 5th, 1850, a bourgeois edition of the decree of
the Provisional Government of March 2nd, 1848, holds in all workshops without
exceptions. Before this law the working-day in France was without definite
limit. It lasted in the factories 14, 15, or more hours. See “Des
classes ouvrières en France, pendant l’année 1848. Par M. Blanqui.” M.
Blanqui the economist, not the Revolutionist, had been entrusted by the
Government with an inquiry into the condition of the working-class.
97. Belgium is the model bourgeois state
in regard to the regulation of the working-day. Lord Howard of Welden,
English Plenipotentiary at Brussels, reports to the Foreign Office May
12th, 1862: “M. Rogier, the minister, informed me that children’s labour
is limited neither by a general law nor by any local regulations; that
the Government, during the last three years, intended in every session
to propose a bill on the subject, but always found an insuperable obstacle
in the jealous opposition to any legislation in contradiction with the
principle of perfect freedom of labour.”
98. “It is certainly much to be regretted
that any class of persons should toil 12 hours a day, which, including
the time for their meals and for going to and returning from their work,
amounts, in fact, to 14 of the 24 hours.... Without entering into the question
of health, no one will hesitate, I think, to admit that, in a moral
point of view, so entire an absorption of the time of the working-classes,
without intermission, from the early age of 13, and in trades not subject
to restriction, much younger, must be extremely prejudicial, and is an
evil greatly to be deplored.... For the sake, therefore, of public morals,
of bringing up an orderly population, and of giving the great body of the
people a reasonable enjoyment of life, it is much to be desired that in
all trades some portion of every working-day should be reserved for rest
and leisure.” (Leonard Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Dec.,
1841.”)
99. See “Judgment of Mr. J. H. Otway,
Belfast. Hilary Sessions, County Antrim, 1860.”
100. It is very characteristic of the
regime of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, that the one Factory Act
passed during his reign, that of March 22nd, 1841, was never put in force.
And this law only dealt with child-labour. It fixed 8 hours a day for children
between 8 and 12, 12 hours for children between 12 and 16, &c., with
many exceptions which allow night-work even for children 8 years old. The
supervision and enforcement of this law are, in a country where every mouse
is under police administration, left to the good-will of the amis du
commerce. Only since 1853, in one single department — the Departement
du Nord — has a paid government inspector been appointed. Not less characteristic
of the development of French society, generally, is the fact, that Louis
Philippe’s law stood solitary among the all-embracing mass of French laws,
till the Revolution of 1848.
101. “Report of Insp. of Fact.” 30th
April, 1860, p. 50.
102. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
October, 1849, p. 6.
103. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
October, 1848, p. 98.
104. Leonard Horner uses the expression
“nefarious practices” in his official reports. (“Report of Insp. of Fact.,”
31st October, 1859, p. 7.)
105. “Rept.,” &c., 30th Sept.,
1844, p. 15.
106. The Act allows children to be
employed for 10 hours if they do not work day after day, but only on alternate
days. In the main, this clause remained inoperative.
107. “As a reduction in their hours
of work would cause a larger number (of children) to be employed, it was
thought that the additional supply of children from 8 to 9 years of age
would meet the increased demand” (l.c., p. 13 ).
108. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
Oct., 1848, p. 16.
109. “I found that men who had been
getting 10s. a week, had had 1s. taken off for a reduction in the rate
of 10 per cent, and 1s. 6d. off the remaining 9s. for the reduction in
time, together 2s. 6d.. and notwithstanding this, many of them said they
would rather work 10 hours.” l.c.
110. “‘Though I signed it [the petition],
I said at the time I was putting my hand to a wrong thing.’ ‘Then why did
you put your hand to it?’ ‘Because I should have been turned off if I had
refused.’ Whence it would appear that this petitioner felt himself ‘oppressed,’
but not exactly by the Factory Act.” l.c., p. 102.
111. p. 17, l.c. In Mr. Horner’s district
10,270 adult male labourers were thus examined in 181 factories. Their
evidence is to be found in the appendix to the Factory Reports for the
half-year ending October 1848. These examinations furnish valuable material
in other connexions also.
112. l.c. See the evidence collected
by Leonard Horner himself, Nos. 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93, and that collected
by Sub-lnspector A., Nos. 51, 52, 58, 59, 62, 70, of the Appendix. One
manufacturer, too, tells the plain truth. See No. 14, and No. 265, l.c.
113. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, pp. 133, 134.
114. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1848, p. 47.
115. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, p. 130.
116. Reports, &c., l.c., p. 142.
117. Reports &c., for 31st October,
1850, pp. 5, 6.
118. The nature of capital remains
the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form. In the code which
the influence of the slave-owners, shortly before the outbreak of the American
Civil War, imposed on the territory of New Mexico, it is said that the
labourer, in as much as the capitalist has bought his labour-power, “is
his (the capitalist’s) money.” The same view was current among the Roman
patricians. The money they had advanced to the plebeian debtor had been
transformed via the means of subsistence into the flesh and blood of the
debtor. This “flesh and blood” were, therefore, “their money.” Hence,
the Shylock-law of the Ten Tables. Linguet’s hypothesis that the patrician
creditors from time to time prepared, beyond the Tiber, banquets of debtors’
flesh, may remain as undecided as that of Daumer on the Christian Eucharist.
119. Reports, &c.. for 30th April,
1848, p. 28.
120. Thus, among others, Philanthropist
Ashworth to Leonard Horner, in a disgusting Quaker letter. (Reports, &c.,
April, 1849, p. 4.)
121. l.c., p. 140.
122. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, pp. 21, 22. Cf like examples ibid., pp. 4, 5.
123. By I. and II. Will. IV., ch. 24,
s. 10, known as Sir John Hobhouse’s Factory Act, it was forbidden to any
owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother
of such owner, to act as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that concerned
the Factory Act.
124. l.c.
125. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, p. 5.
126. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1849, p. 6.
127. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, p. 21.
128. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, p. 95.
129. See Reports, &c., for 30th
April, 1849, p. 6, and the detailed explanation of the “shifting system,”
by Factory Inspectors Howell and Saunders, in “Reports, &c., for 31st
October, 1848.” See also the petition to the Queen from the clergy of Ashton
and vicinity, in the spring of 1849, against the “shift system.”
130. Cf. for example, “The
Factory Question and the Ten Hours’ Bill.”, By R. H. Greg, 1837.
131. F. Engels: “The English Ten Hours’
Bill.” (In the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-oekonomische Revue.”
Edited by K. Marx. April number, 1850, p. 13.) The same “high” Court of
Justice discovered, during the American Civil War, a verbal ambiguity which
exactly reversed the meaning of the law against the arming of pirate ships.
132. Rep., &c., for 30th April,
1850.
133. In winter, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
may be substituted.
134. “The present law (of 1850) was
a compromise whereby the employed surrendered the benefit of the Ten Hours’
Act for the advantage of one uniform period for the commencement and termination
of the labour of those whose labour is restricted.” (Reports, &c.,
for 30th April, 1852, p. 14.)
135. Reports, &c., for Sept., 1844,
p. 13.
136. l.c.
137. l.c.
138. “Reports, &c., for 31st Oct.,
1846,” p. 20.
139. Reports, &c., for 31st Oct.,
1861, p. 26.
140. l.c.,p. 27. On the whole the
working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved physically.
All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at
different times has convinced me of it. Nevertheless, and exclusive of
the terrible death-rate of children in the first years of their life, the
official reports of Dr. Greenhow show the unfavourable health condition
of the manufacturing districts as compared with “agricultural districts
of normal health.” As evidence, take the following table from his 1861
report: —
Pecentage of Adult
Males Engaged
in Manufactures
14.9
42.6
37.3
41.9
31.0
14.9
36.6
30.4
—
Death-rate from
Pulmonary Affections
per 100,000 Males
598
708
547
611
691
588
721
726
305
Name of
District
Wigan
Blackburn
Halifax
Bradford
Maccles-
field
Leek
Stoke-
upon-Trent
Woolstanton
Eight healthy
agricultural
districts
Death-rate from
Pulmonary Affections
per 100,000 Females
644
734
564
603
804
705
665
727
340
Pecentage of Adult
Females Engaged
in Manufactures
18.0
34.9
20.4
30.0
26.0
17.2
19.3
13.9
—
Kind of
Female
Occupation
Cotton
Do.
Worsted
Do.
Silk
Do.
Earthenware
Do.
—
141. It is well known with what reluctance the English “Free-traders” gave up the protective duty on the silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection
to English factory children now serves their turn.
142. During 1859 and 1860, the zenith
years of the English cotton industry, some manufacturers tried, by the
decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives
to an extension of the working-day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor
mincers put an end to the experiment by a petition to their employers in
which they say, “Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and,
while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than
the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land, and
that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves and future generations....
This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we commence
work again after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, we shall work 60
hours per week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half
out.” (Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1860, p. 30.)
143. On the means that the wording
of this Act afforded for its violation of the Parliamentary Return “Factories
Regulation Act” (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner’s “Suggestions
for amending the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal
working, now becoming very prevalent.”
144. “Children of the age of 8 years
and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the
last half year in my district.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1857,
p. 39.)
145. “The Printworks’ Act is admitted
to be a failure both with reference to its educational and protective provisions.”
(Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 52.)
146. Thus, e.g., E. Potter in
a letter to the Times of March 24th, 1863. The Times reminded
him of the manufacturers’ revolt against the Ten Hours’ Bill.
147. Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch,
collaborator and editor of Tooke’s “History of Prices.” Is it a scientific
advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?
148. The Act passed in 1860, determined
that, in regard to dye and bleachworks, the working-day should be fixed
on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and definitely on August
1st, 1862, at 10 hours, i.e., at 10½ hours for ordinary days,
and 7½ for Saturday. Now, when the fatal year, 1862, came, the old farce
was repeated. Besides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow
the employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year
longer. “In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton
famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives to work 12 hours
per day, and make wages when they could.” A bill to this effect had been
brought in, “and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers
in Scotland that the bill was abandoned.” (Reports, &c., for 31st
October, 1862, pp. 14-15.) Thus defeated by the very workpeople, in whose
name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer
spectacles, that the Act of 1860, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament
for the “protection of labour,” in equivocal phrases, gave them a pretext
to exclude from its working the calenderers and finishers. English jurisprudence,
ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common
Pleas this piece of pettifogging. “The operatives have been greatly disappointed
... they have complained of over-work, and it is greatly to be regretted
that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by reason
of a faulty definition.” (l.c., p. 18.)
149. The “open-air bleachers” had evaded
the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at it in the
night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time
Parliament was, by petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions
as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which bleaching in the open-air was
reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying-rooms were used
at temperatures of from 90° to 100° Fahrenheit, in which the work
was done for the most part by girls. “Cooling” is the technical expression
for their occasional escape from the drying-rooms into the fresh air. “Fifteen
girls in stoves. Heat from 80° to 90° for linens, and 100°
and upwards for cambrics. Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small
room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a close stove. The
girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries
the cambrics rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands
are unlimited. If busy, they work till 9 or 12 at night for successive
nights.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 56.) A medical man
states: “No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature
gets too high, or the workers’ hands get soiled from perspiration, they
are allowed to go out for a few minutes.... My experience, which is considerable,
in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion
that their sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives
in a spinning factory (and Capital, in its memorials to Parliament, had
painted them as floridly healthy after the manner of Rubens.) The diseases
most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of
uterine functions, hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism.
All of these, I believe, are either directly or indirectly induced by the
impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed
and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the
cold, damp atmosphere, in winter, when going to their homes.” (l.c., pp.
56-57.) The Factory Inspectors remarked on the supplementary law of 1860,
torn from these open-air bleachers: “The Act has not only failed to afford
that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains
a clause ... apparently so worded that, unless persons are detected working
after 8 o’clock at night they appear to come under no protective provisions
at all, and if they do so work the mode of proof is so doubtful that a
conviction can scarcely follow.” (l.c., p. 52.) “To all intents and purposes,
therefore, as an Act for any benevolent or educational purpose, it is a
failure; since it can scarcely be called benevolent to permit, which is
tantamount to compelling, women and children to work 14 hours a day with
or without meals, as the case may be, and perhaps for longer hours than
these, without limit as to age, without reference to sex, and without regard
to the social habits of the families of the neighbourhood, in which such
works (bleaching and dyeing) are situated.” (Reports, &c., for 30th
April, 1863, p. 40.)
150. Note to the 2nd Ed. Since
1866, when I wrote the above passages, a reaction has again set in.
151. “The conduct of each of these
classes (capitalists and workmen) has been the result of the relative situation
in which they have been placed.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848,
p. 113.)
152. “The employments, placed under
restriction, were connected with the manufacture of textile fabrics by
the aid of steam or water-power There were two conditions to which an employment
must be subject to cause it to be inspected, viz., the use of steam or
waterpower, and the manufacture of certain specified fibre.” (Reports,
&c., for 31st October, 1864, p. 8.)
153. On the condition of so-called
domestic industries, specially valuable materials are to be found in the
latest reports of the Children’s Employment Commission.
154. “The Acts of last Session (1864)
... embrace a diversity of occupations, the customs in which differ greatly,
and the use of mechanical power to give motion to machinery is no longer
one of the elements necessary, as formerly, to constitute, in legal phrase,
a ‘Factory.’” (Reports, &c., for 31st Octaber, 1864, p. 8.)
155. Belgium, the paradise of Continental
Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the coal and metal
mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect “freedom”
at any period and through any length of time. Of every 1,000 persons employed
there, 733 are men, 88 women, 135 boys, and 44 girls under 16; in the blast
furnaces, &c., of every 1,000, 668 are men, 149 women, 98 boys, and
85 girls under 16. Add to this the low wages for the enormous exploitation
of mature and immature labour-power. The average daily pay for a man is
2s. 8d., for a woman, 1s. 8d., for a boy, 1s. 2½d. As a result, Belgium
had in 1863, as compared with 1850, nearly doubled both the amount and
the value of its exports of coal, iron, &c.
156. Robert Owen, soon after 1810,
not only maintained the necessity of a limitation of the working-day in
theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours’ day into his factory at New
Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic Utopia; so were his “Combination
of children’s education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies
of workingmen, first called into being by him. To-day, the first Utopia
is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory
Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.
157. Ure: “French translation, Philosophie
des Manufactures.” Paris, 1836, Vol. II, pp. 39, 40, 67, 77, &c.
158. In the Compte Rendu of the International
Statistical Congress at Paris, 1855, it is stated: “The French law, which
limits the length of daily labour in factories and workshops to 12 hours,
does not confine this work to definite fixed hours. For children’s labour
only the work-time is prescribed as between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. Therefore,
some of the masters use the right which this fatal silence gives them to
keep their works going, without intermission, day in, day out, possibly
with the exception of Sunday. For this purpose they use two different sets
of workers, of whom neither is in the workshop more than 12 hours at a
time, but the work of the establishment lasts day and night. The law is
satisfied, but is humanity?” Besides “the destructive influence or night-labour
on the human organism,” stress is also laid upon “the fatal influence of
the association of the two sexes by night in the same badly-lighted workshops.”
159. “For instance, there is within
my district one occupier who, within the same curtilage, is at the same
time a bleacher and dyer under the Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act, a printer
under the Print Works Act, and a finisher under the Factory Act.” (Report
of Mr. Baker, in Reports, lic., for October 31st, 1861, p. 20.) After enumerating
the different provisions of these Acts, and the complications arising from
them, Mr. Baker says: “It will hence appear that it must be very difficult
to secure the execution of these three Acts of Parliament where the occupier
chooses to evade the law.” But what is assured to the lawyers by this is
law-suits.
160. Thus the Factory Inspectors at
last venture to say: “These objections (of capital to the legal limitation
of the working-day) must succumb before the broad principle of the rights
of labour.... There is a time when the master’s right in his workman’s
labour ceases, and his time becomes his own, even if there were no exhaustion
in the question.” (Reports, 8cc., for 31 st Oct., 1862, p. 54.)
161. “We, the workers of Dunkirk, declare
that the length of time of labour required under the present system is
too great, and that, far from leaving the worker time for rest and education,
it plunges him into a condition of servitude but little better than slavery.
That is why we decide that 8 hours are enough for a working-day, and ought
to be legally recognised as enough; why we call to our help that powerful
lever, the press; ... and why we shall consider all those that refuse us
this help as enemies of the reform of labour and of the rights of the labourer.”
(Resolution of the Working Men of Dunkirk, New York State, 1866.)
162. Reports, &c., for Oct., 1848,
p. 112.
163. “The proceedings (the manoeuvres
of capital, e.g., from 1848-50) have afforded, moreover, incontrovertible
proof of the fallacy of the assertion so often advanced, that operatives
need no protection, but may be considered as free agents in the disposal
of the only property which they possess — the labour of their hands and
the sweat of their brows.” (Reports, &c., for April 30th, 1850, p.
45.) “Free labour (if so it may be termed) even in a free country, requires
the strong arm of the law to protect it.” (Reports, &c., for October 31st,
1864, p. 34.) “To permit, which is tantamount to compelling ... to work
14 hours a day with or without meals,” &c. (Repts., &c., for April
30th, 1863, p. 40.)
164. Friedrich Engels, l.c., p. 5.
165. The 10 Hours’ Act has, in the
branches of industry that come under it, “put an end to the premature decrepitude
of the former long-hour workers.” (Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1859,
p. 47.) “Capital (in factories) can never be employed in keeping the machinery
in motion beyond a limited time, without certain injury to the health and
morals of the labourers employed; and they are not in a position to protect
themselves.” l.c., p. 8)
166. “A still greater boon is the distinction
at last made clear between the worker’s own time and his master’s. The
worker knows now when that which he sells is ended, and when his own begins;
and by possessing a sure foreknowledge of this, is enabled to prearrange
his own minutes for his own purposes.” (l.c., p. 52.) “By making them
masters of their own time (the Factory Acts) have given them a moral energy
which is directing them to the eventual possession of political power”
(l.c., p. 47). With suppressed irony, and in very well weighed words,
the Factory Inspectors hint that the actual law also frees the capitalist
from some of the brutality natural to a man who is a mere embodiment of
capital, and that it has given him time for a little “culture.” “Formerly
the master had no time for anything but money; the servant had no time
for anything but labour” (l.c., p. 48).
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Capital Volume One- Index