The Factory System and the Factory Acts

PREFACE

HALF-A-CENTURY ago the Factory System meant to the minds of most people a new and portentous phenomenon in industry against which unusual precautions had to be taken lest it should issue in a degenerated race of operative labourers; Factory Acts meant the partial and peculiar body of laws specially devised to avert this catastrophe. At the present day both these significations are completely obsolete. So far from the Factory System being regarded now as likely to degenerate labourers, it is that persistently recommended by some of the best friends of labour as a happy means of escape from other modes of industry; and the Factory Acts are so little partial in their operation, that it is difficult for anyone, not an expert, to say what is, and what is not (within the compass of productive industry) excluded from their wide-spreading influence. These great changes seem to require some explanation. The fundamental explanation resides, of course, in

"The age and body of the time

Its form and pressure :"

- which have welded out those malleable materials into this new mass; but a popular statement of how it all has come about, and to what extent actually proceeded, should not be out of place either in view of the manifold interests concerned. This is the purpose of the following pages.