and heedless of the fatal results which their love of this busy and independent life is bringing on their unfortunate offspring who are pining at home.”[1] Every phenomenon of the factory districts is here reproduced, including, but to a greater extent, ill-disguised infanticide, and dosing children with opiates.[2] “My Knowledge of such evils,” says Dr. Simon, the medical officer of the Privy Council and editor in chief of the Reports on Public Health, “may excuse the profound misgiving with which I regard any large industrial employment of adult women.”[3] “Happy indeed,” exclaims Mr. Baker, the factory inspector, in his official report, “happy indeed will it be for the manufacturing districts of England, when every married woman having a family is prohibited from working in any textile works at all.”[4]
The moral degradation caused by the capitalistic exploitation of women and children has been so exhaustively depicted by F. Engels in his “Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse Englands,” and other writers, that I need only mention the subject in this place. But the intellectual desolation, artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value, a state of mind clearly distinguishable from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without destroying its capacity for development, its natural fertility, this desolation finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a compulsory condition to the “productive” employment of children under 14 years, in every industry subject to the Factory Acts. The spirit of capitalist production stands out clearly in the ludicrous wording of the so-called education clauses in the Factory Acts, in the absence of an administrative machinery, an absence that again makes the compulsion illusory, in the
- ↑ l. c., p. 456.
- ↑ In the agricultural as well as in the factory districts the consumption of opium among the grown-up labourers, both male and female, is extending daily. “To push the sale of opiate … is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article.” (l. c., p. 459.) Infants that take opiates “shrank up into little old men,” or “wizzened like little monkeys,” (l. c., p. 460.) We here see how India and China avenged themselves on England.
- ↑ l. c., p. 37.
- ↑ “Rep of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 59. Mr. Baker was formerly a doctor.
