" The author declares that "there is more
serfdom now in England than at any time since the Conquest. . . .
The people were better clothed, better fed, and better lodged just
before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The average
term of life among the working classes is seventeen."
One of the first results of machinery taking the place of human labour
was that an enormous number of women and young children of both sexes
were employed in the factories in place of grown men, who were no
longer needed. Especially in the spinning mills thousands of men were
thrown out of work, and lower wages were paid to those who took their
place. This led directly to the breaking up of the home and home-life.
The wives were often obliged to spend twelve to thirteen hours a day
in the mills; the very young children, left to themselves, grew up
like wild weeds and were often put out to nurse at a shilling or
eighteenpence a day.
One reads of tired children driven to their work with blows; of
children who, "too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the
drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the
factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night
that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite,
that their parents found them kneeling by the bedside where they had
fallen asleep during their prayers."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the greatest poets of Victoria's
reign, pleads for mercy and human kindness in her "Cry of the
Children.
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