In the interpretation given to the words "solely employed in the manufacture of lace," (see 1st section of the present law), these mills are now not subject to any regulation; nevertheless in a large proportion of them both children and young persons are employed in operations exactly similar to what are subject to the provisions of the Act in other mills. These children and young persons are not protected in lace-mills, simply because the thread they manufacture or prepare is twisted into lace on the same premises, and not sold for this purpose to another manufacturer. In lace-mills, the period at which the bobbins or carriages require to be filled with thread is irregular and uncertain. Mr. Bury assures me that he is very credibly informed, even children under 13 are kept during the night in some mills for the purpose of being ready for this operation whenever wanted, being allowed in the intervals to take any rest they can on the floor of the mill; there is scarcely any lace-mill in which young persons, from 13 to 18 years of age, are not employed the full number of hours the mill is at work, viz., 15 or 16 hours a-day. The facilities thus afforded to these mills for extending their operations, by working children and young persons to an extent which has been deemed injurious to their health, obliges the occupiers of mills for doubling lace thread, wherein these classes are subject to restriction, to obtain as many persons above 18 as possible who will consent to work a greater number than 12 hours; and thus I am assured a considerable number of young women, from 18 to 21 years of age, are now employed for 15 or 16 hours with only one interval for meals. One of the remedies suggested, and which, in my opinion, would probably remove the greatest part of this evil is, that all mills in which any of the articles enumerated in the present law are manufactured should be subject to the same restriction, the one as the other. Thus extending to lace and silk mills the provisions as they are proposed to apply to cotton, wool, and flax mills. The statement laid before me by Mr. Bury is confirmatory of the accounts I had previously received, and to which I have referred in former reports. The special manner in which the present application has been made has induced me thus to recur to the subject, at a period when, if your Lordship should deem it expedient, the necessary provision might be made in the Bill now before Parliament. I have the honour to remain, My Lord, Your Lordship's most obedient servant, Report by R.J. Saunders, Esq. 1st April, 1839.. B Report by 1st April, 1839. REPORT from James Stuart, Esq., for the Quarter ending MY LORD, Belfast, 1st April, 1839. I am now, agreeably to your Lordship's desire, to submit to you my Ja. Stuart, Esq. Quarterly Report for the period from the 1st January to 31st ultimo, inclusive. My colleagues and myself held in January, in London, our statutory half-yearly meeting, at which our joint half-yearly Report was made out, and communicated to your Lordship. We were afterwards employed in preparing our joint Report on the effects of the educational provisions of the Factory Regulation Act, and in considering and making such remarks as occurred to us on the provisions in the draft of the Factory Bill, which was, by desire of the Hon. Fox Maule, laid before us for our opinion and report. I was subsequently detained in London by Mr. Maule's desire, until after the second reading of that Bill. Latterly, I have been employed in making a general circuit of my district, in the course of which I have inspected-1st, the factories in the eastern division of Scotland, at Hawick, in Roxburghshire; Selkirk and Galashiels, in Selkirkshire; Stow, Leith, Musselburgh, Dalkeith, Prestonholme, and Malleny, in Mid-Lothian or Edinburghshire; at Dunfermline, in Fifeshire; at Alloa, Menstrie, Alva, Tillicoultry, Devonside, Keilor's Brae, and Gaberston, in Clackmannanshire; at Perth and Stanley, in Perthshire; at Dundee and Arbroath, where I visited all the factories, in Forfarshire, and at Aberdeen, and on the river Don, in Aberdeenshire;-2nd, the factories in the western division of Scotland, at Blackburn and Westfield, in West-Lothian, or Linlithgowshire; at Glasgow, where I visited above one-half of the factories; in Lanarkshire, at Milngavie; Ballindalloch and Culcreuch, in Stirlingshire; and at Duntocher, in Dumbartonshire ;-and, 3rdly, the factories at Belfast, and in its neighbourhood, in Ireland. The superintendents accompanied me on my visits to many of the factories in their respective divisions, and especially to all of them at Dundee, Arbroath, Glasgow, Belfast, and in its vicinity. I have reason to be satisfied with their diligence and zeal, and with their attention to my instruction to them, on every visit to inspect the children and young persons whose names have been added to the register of workers since the last visit of the inspector or superintendent. The factory owners, and occupiers, never fail to dismiss every child or young person, though holding apparently regular certificates of age, objected to, as not of the age certified, on their visits by the inspector or superintendents. The duty of inspecting a factory, which is frequently visited, is thus very much simplified and shortened, and at the same time, in its most important points, effectually discharged. On this circuit, I found altogether 24 certificates of age, granted since the last visit of the superintendent to young persons, who seemed to me not to have attained the certified age of thirteen years old; and my objections to the certificates were in every case sustained, and the young persons dismissed. Not a single instance occurred of children under thirteen years of age being employed who did not appear to be of the certified age, and whose names were not inserted in the weekly certificates of attendance at school; but there were a few cases where the school certificate showed that children were employed who had been absent from school for a day or more during the preceding week. In such cases, the children were, on my objecting to their being employed, dismissed, until they could produce certificates of their attendance for two hours a day for six of the seven preceding days. At Belfast, and in the neighbourhood, a few of the flax factories are at present worked in the night by persons above eighteen years of age. Mr. Hudson, the resident superintendent, frequently visits those factories late in the evening, and on a recent occasion, accompanied by the surgeon, who certifies the ages at those factories, he could only observe two workers, who appeared to be under eighteen years old, but who, it was found, on investigating the fact, had attained that age. On visiting those factories I objected to two workers as being under eighteen; one of whom, it turned out, was above that age: the other, by name James Stewart, was, it was ascertained, not yet seventeen years old. He had been a few days before my inspection brought to the factory of Mr. W. J. Moore, at Ligoneil, near Belfast, as of the proper age, by his brother John Stewart, the preparing master at that factory, who was perfectly aware of his brother's age. Mr. Moore, therefore, immediately dismissed John Stewart, the person actually to blame, and gave me an obligation that his dismissal from his factory should be permanent. James Stewart is, of course, not again to be employed during the night. I have not, I am glad to say, discovered, in the course of my circuit, any other serious offence whatever in contravention of the provisions of the Act, nor any such instance of negligence, or inattention to the regulations, as would justify me in directing recourse to be had to any suit for penalties or prosecution. The occupiers of factories and their overseers are almost universally anxious carefully to observe the enactments of the statute, and to maintain the character they deservedly have of acting in obedience to the law. I have the honour to be, Report by 1st April, 1839. Report by L. Horner, Esq. 8th July, 1839. REPORT by Leonard Horner, Esq., Inspector of Factories, for the Quarter ending the 30th of June, 1839. MY LORD, London, July 8th, 1839. In the last quarter I have visited Manchester, Preston and the immediate neighbourhood, Lancaster, and various places where factories are situated in North Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, the North Riding of Yorkshire, and that part of the West Riding which lies within my district. The four superintendents who act under my direction have been engaged as usual in their respective divisions, and have given me, weekly, a return of their proceedings. A list of the places visited is subjoined. I think I may say with confidence that the main provisions of the Act, although by no means generally, are very commonly observed; and the admission, on the part of mill occupiers, becomes more and more general, that to conform to the Act interferes very little with the proper business of the factory. From the present great depression in the cotton trade compared with what it was at no very distant period, there is, no doubt, little temptation to exceed the legal hours of work of the young persons; and the diminished demand for labour lessens the risk of children being employed either at an earlier age, or for a greater number of hours, than the law permits. I usually find where the factory is conducted with regularity, as a manufacturing establishment, and, above all, where the master himself looks into the details of the management of his mill, that there the law is best attended to; and there I am frequently told that the Act gives very little trouble, and that, with a moderate degree of attention, everything may be kept in order. Some proprietors of large mills have very recently said to me, that they are convinced the Act has done much good in many ways, and that they would regret to see factories left without some restrictions, either as to the hours of work or to the ages of the persons employed. I find an increasing disposition to employ children under thirteen years of age, either by having their services for eight hours, and doing without them the other four, or by relays; and where a sufficient number can be found, by the employment of a double set, each working six hours. This last plan is attended with so many advantages, both to the mill occupier and to the children, that I take every opportunity of recommending its adoption; and I have the strongest of all arguments to urge in its favour, by being able to cite examples where it is extensively and successfully followed. The usual arrangement for employing children in this way is as follows. The morning set come at the time the mill begins work, and continue till mid-day: they then go home, often take off their working dresses, get washed, and have plenty of time for dinner; they then go to school in the afternoon, where they frequently stay three hours: when daylight permits, they have opportunity for recreation out of doors; or, in the winter, they have rest and can go soon to bed. The afternoon set have no occasion to rise very early, they go to school in the forenoon, get their dinner, and putting on their working dresses go to the mill when it starts after the dinner hour, and remain till it closes in the evening. This matter of the dressing, is by no means an unimportant consideration; for it sometimes decides whether the child is to go to a good or to an indifferent school. In the better description of schools, many teachers object to receiving factory children, because of their dirty working clothes, particularly in the woollen districts, where they are soiled with oil and indigo, the other children objecting to mix with them. The advantages, as concerns the mill occupier, are, that his adult workers are never without their young assistants; and as the dinner hour is a marked break in the factory day, there is much less chance of the children being employed contrary to the provisions of the law, than is the case when the children work by a relay of three for two, (that is, three children under 13 years of age working eight hours each, instead of two above 13 working twelve hours each), for they must, in that case, break off their work in the middle of the periods between the meals, often to the inconvenience of the adult whom they are assisting, and who is thus tempted to keep them longer than he ought; the children also forget, or are not aware that their time is up, and the overlookers have a great deal of trouble in seeing that they go out at the proper time. There is this further advantage in employing a double set in this way, that those who come in the morning may be kept half-an-hour to clean the machinery while the young persons and adults are at dinner, and the afternoon set may come for the same purpose, half-an hour before the mill starts again; and thus the services of the whole of the shorttime hands are obtained, while the machinery is standing. As the afternoon set have sometimes an advantage over the morning set in regard to ease of work, and vice versa, it is the practice, in some mills, to change them weekly, or once a fortnight, or once a month, by which the work, and, sometimes, the wages become equalized. The only disadvantage I know of to the children, or rather to their parents, when they work one-half instead of two-thirds of the day, is the reduction of their wages in the same proportion. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that the plan necessarily gives employment to a greater number of children; and that everything which reduces the inconvenience or trouble holds out an additional inducement to mill occupiers to employ children under thirteen years of age, who now exclude them altogether. These details may appear trifling to your Lordship; my reasons for entering into them are these: first, that it is by devising expedients for removing difficulties in the practical working that we are most likely to get the law generally and cheerfully obeyed, and therefore do most good to the children, who if not the sole, are certainly the chief object of this legislative interference; and, secondly, that as the inspector's reports are made public, it is the readiest mode I can adopt for making this plan known to mill occupiers who hesitate about employing children, because of supposed difficulties in practice, and of supposed danger of becoming liable to penalties, by their work-people employing the children illegally. I am anxious to remove every obstacle to their employment which my official situation. enables me to do; for, as I have stated on former occasions, and all subsequent experience confirms the opinion I then expressed, if children work short time and go daily to a good school, I know of no employment more desirable for them than a well-conducted factory. They are in dry, warm, (and except in cotton mills where fine numbers are spun, not too warm,) well ventilated apartments, and are learning in the mill habits of industry and order, a most important part of education for them. I am happy to say that I have recently seen several instances of improvement in the manner in which the education clauses are complied with; better school rooms, and better teachers. The merit is due to the mill occupiers, and I trust that I shall have to report a progressive improvement in this respect. When the irritation, which the circumstances attending the passing of this Act not unnaturally occasioned, has subsided; when the angry feelings, excited by what appeared an unfair demand, that mill occupiers only should be required to see that the children they employ go to school, have passed away, their better and more natural dispositions will prevail; they will obey the law not merely in form, but will take care that the children shall, at least, have all the advantages of education which the place affords, and their circumstances will admit of. In my late special report on the operation of the educational clauses, I stated that I had seen children schooled in the coal-hole of the engine furnace, by the fireman, and taught from fragments of books as black nearly as the fuel. I saw an instance of that in June, 1838. The remonstrance I then made was met in a good spirit by the mill occupier, who immediately set about building a school-room on the premises, and a fortnight ago I had the satisfaction, in visiting this place, to find a large number of children, assembled in a suitable room, receiving a lesson from a master who was evidently well qualified; I saw many well-written copybooks; and I heard them read from a clean copy of the New Testament in the hands of each child. Although much remains to be done, no one who inquires properly into the subject can doubt that the clauses of the Act which make attendance in school imperative, have procured some education at least to several thousand children, who, in all probability, would otherwise have got none at all, and in several instances an education far superior to that in the ordinary description of schools for the working classes in this country. That the law has not been universally observed in my district in the last quarter, the following abstract of 43 cases of prosecution too plainly shows; and I am sorry to say that instances of gross violations, as regards the employment of children, have occurred in mills where, from the station of the proprietors, better things might have been expected. If the bill now before Parliament shall become law, the opportunities of evasion will be greatly diminished, and the number of prosecutions will, I am persuaded, be proportionally diminished. I have the honour to be, my Lord, Report by 8th July, 1839. |