Labour Problems in Two Worlds

Abstract

THE history of factory legislation is essentially empirical. Over a hundred years of experiment have taken place in this politicoeconoMic field, and gradually the idea has been accepted that minimuim standards in the conditions of employment should be laid down by the community and secured by law to its citizens. The movement began in Great Britain, and it began here, as it has everywhere begun, in the effort to protect the children. In I796 Dr. Thomas Percival and his colleagues in Manchester analysed the evils of overwork and overcrowding in the new large cotton factories, and proposed that parliamentary aid should be given to establish a general system of laws for the wise, humane and equal government of all such works.'' Nevertheless, Sir Robert Peel's Act of I8o2 (Health and Morals of Apprentices Act) was, as its title would indicate, rather an extension of the old Poor Law than a deliberate incursion into the sphere of industrial control. Yet within thirty years from this date we can find the beginnings, mostly unconscious, of many characteristic tendencies and achievements of the following century. In i8i8, for instance, Robert Owen, the practical visionary of factory reform, circulated to the gathering of allied diplomats at Aix-la-Chapelle a memorial in which he drew their attention to the vital need for fixing internationally the legal limits of the normal working day for the industrial classes of Europe.2 This, in a world that had not yet invented railways or telegraphs, and which was, according to most economic historians, only in the opening stage of its industrial revolution ! Meanwhile, at home, by personal example in his mills and by agitation, Owen gave invaluable aid to the movement for factory legislation; and the Act of I8I9 set up a useful standard in declaring a minimum age-limit of nine years for the