sity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France.1 The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working-day 10 hours, i.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., including an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus leaving 10 working hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., of which an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working hours are left, 10 for each of the first 5 days, 7 for the last.2 Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus-labour. Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors.3 "In general and within certain limits, exceeding the medium size of their kind, is evidence of the prosperity of organic beings. As to man, his bodily height lessens if his due growth is interfered with, either by physical or social conditions. In all European countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service, has diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry in France was 165 centimetres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the law of 1852, 156 c. m.; on the average in France more than half are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 c. m. It is now 155. In Prussia it is 157. According to the statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette, May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is, that in Prussia out of 1000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because of deficiency in height, and 399 because of bodily defects. Berlin in 1858, could not provide its contingent of recruits; it was 156 men short." J. von Liebig: "Die Chemie in inrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie, 1863," 7th Ed., vol 1., pp. 117, 118. The history of the Factory Act of 1850 will be found in the course of this chapter. I only touch here and there on the period from the beginning of modern industry in England to 1845. For this period I refer the reader to "Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, von Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845." How completely Engels understood the nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports, Reports on Mines, &c., that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most superficial comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children's Employment Commission, published 18 to 20 years later (1863-1867). These deal especially with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to 1862, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced. Here, then, little or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions painted by Engels. I borrow my examples "The fraudulent millowner begins work at a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves off a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less after 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working days.' "Five minutes a day's increased work, multiplied by 50 weeks, are equal to two and a half days of produce in the year." 2 "An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a.m., after 6 p.m., and at the beginning and end of the chiefly from the free trade period after 1848, that age of paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the great firm of free trade, blatant as ignorant, tell such fabulous tales. For the rest England figures here in the forground because she is the classic representative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous set of official statistics of the things we are considering. 1 Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L. Horner, Inspector of Factories in: Factory Regula tions Act. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859 P. 4, 5. * Reports of the Inspector of Factories for the half year, October, 1856, p. 35. times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year."1 Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories work "short time," i.e., for only a part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working day. The less business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time. Thus the Factory Inspector's report on the period of the crisis from 1857 to 1858: "It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. . . . . In the last half year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing," yet, overwork is continued beyond the legal hours, 2 3 "For a great part of the time," says Mr. Howell, "owing to the depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment." The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crisis from 1861 to 1865. "It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c.], especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve . . . they would not have been so employed if sufficient time had been set apart 1 Reports, &c., 30th April, 1858, p. 9. 2 Reports, &c., 1. c., p. 43. Reports, &c., 1. c., p. 25. Reports, &c., for the half year ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Reports, &c., 31st October, 1862, p. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during the last half year 1863. Cf. Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 1863, p. 7. specially for cleaning, &c., either before 6 a.m. [sic] or before 2 p. m. on Saturday afternoons."1 "The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain. . . .2 In cases where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors making out a case."3 These "small thefts" of capital from the labourer's meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as "petty pilfering of minutes," "snatching a few minutes," or, as the labourers technically called them, "nibbling and cribbling at meal times."6 It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus-value by surplus-labour, is not secret. "If you allow me," said a highly respectable master to me, "to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket."7 "Moments are the elements of profit."8 1 Reports, &c., October 31st, 1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of manufacturers given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption in factory labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning of June, 1836, information reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (Yorkshire) that the owners of 8 large mills in the neighbourhood of Batley had violated the Factory Acts. Some of these gentlemen were accused of having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for meals and one hour for sleep at midnight. And these children had to do this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the "shoddy-hole," as the hole is called, in which the woolen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere of dust, shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth continually with handkerchiefs for the protec tion of his lungs! The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath-as quakers they were too scrupulously religious to take an oath-that they had, in their great compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. The quaker gentlemen were mulcted in £20. Dryden anticipated these gentry: "Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity, That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie, 1. c. p., p. 48. Rep., 31st Oct., 1856, p. 34. 1. c., p. 48. 71. c., p. 48. Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as "fulltimers," and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as "half-timers." The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of "full-timers" and "half-timers."1 SECTION 3.—BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION. We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension of the working day, the were-wolf's hunger for surplus-labour in a department where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins,2 caused capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters to this day, or was so yesterday. Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th of January, 1860, "that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world ... Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for. a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stonelike torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate. . ... We are not surprised that Mr. Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion . . . . . The 1 This is the official expression both in the factories and in the reports. 2 "The cupidity of mill-owners whose cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by those perpetrated by the Spaniards in the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold." John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes, 3rd Ed. London, 1835, p. 114. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a great extent, a shameless plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden's "History of the Poor." London, 1799. |