The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-01 00:00:00

THE FACTORIES BILL.

The factory question is now in the hands of the land-
owners. So it bas ever been in fact; but just now their
intimate relation to it happens to be more evident than
ever. Its opponents cannot be called a party, either
Whig; or Liberal, or manufacturing; for it has its sup-
porters from all classes. " The Opposition" is divided
upon it. The agriculturists, then, can, if they please,
pass Lord Ashley's amendment—not quite scot-free,
perhaps, for they are threatened with the perils and ex-
penses of a dissolution, or even a change of Ministry.
Still, if they choose to run these risks, they can pass a
Ten Hours' Bill without the smallest difficulty in the
world. They have only to say aye, and the thing is done.
Now this is a very important fact, and deserves to
be remembered hereafter, whatever the present result
may happen to be. Long hours are generally considered
the sin of the master manufactured. These unnatural
monsters, it seems to be commonly supposed, in order
that they may accumulate enormous fortunes, get thirty
per cent. interest on their capital,—as the Agricultural
Protection Society informs us,—buy up the estates of
the impoverished landowners, ruin all the other manu-
facturers in the world, and perpetrate other like atroci-
ties, forcibly and illegally impress and detain from their
natural guardians myriads of helpless women and chil-
dren, regularly drain their life's blood out of them, com-
pelling them to work till they drop. By alternate
seduction and violence they get the miserable creatures
into their clutches, and only resign them as a spider—
the original of all cotton-spinners—resigns his prey, viz.,
when he has sucked it thoroughly dead and dry. The
agriculturist, on the other hand, is represented as a dis-
tracted mother deprived of her children, roaming over
the face of the earth, and finding them at last in the den
of the millowner, from whom she in vain demands her
own. The philanthropist, like another Theseus, is to
attack the Minotaur in his labyrinth, and by the extinc-
tion of the monster is to put an end to the cruel tribute
which he has hitherto been suffered to exact. Such is
the ordinary picture. But, like many a scene of ro-
mance, the course of human affairs has now made it a
practical question. It comes home to the landowners.
Here is the monster; here are his victims. It is in the
power of the landowners to set the victims at liberty, at
least to alleviate their misery. What they have wished
and talked about so many 3 ears they now can do. Do
it. Why hold back? What's the the matter now? "If
we do," they reply, " we shall turn out a Minister
or two, get into a mess perhaps with our own labourers,
and, horrendum dictu, have cheap corn." 0 raae philan-
thropists! 0 easy compassion! 0 flummery of talk! It is
an atrocious cruelty in the millowners to overwork women
and young people, because otherwise they cannot sell
their calicoes ; what is it then in you to acquiesce
willingly in this cruelty, because otherwise you cannot
keep your friends in poiver, or get a good price
for your corn ? Whatever you have said of
the manufacturers, posterity will surely say of you.
Wis© men have always been chary of benevolent
talk, from a sort of presentiment that they might
some day find a sort of necessity to eat their own
words. The wisest man could not have foreseen such an
emergency as this. There is no doubt that the agricul-
turists can pass the measure, but then it may possibly
touch their pockets. Yet how little mercy had they on
the pockets, and even the bare solvency and subsistence,
of the manufacturer! So long as somebody else was to
pay, their generous indignation knew no bounds. The
merest shadow of a possibility of the price coming out
of the landowner's purse, puts to flight the whole army
of philanthropists.
We will eonfess that we never have thought the land-
owner and the millowner to be different orders of hu-
manity. They are both of them capitalists ; and, as
capitalists, are generally found to possess a decided
leaning towards the fnterests of capital. They like other
things, but perhaps nothing so decidedly and constantly
as a good per tentage. Amongst the things which they
do not like, unprofitable burdens, useless aad superfluous
mouths, human waste and refuse, all that impediment
and friction that clogs and cripples speculation, are the
most odious. The treatment of the agricultural la-
bourer at the pands of the landowner is a sufficient indi-
cation of what every other industrial class must expect
from him. They who acquiesced so easily in the New
Poor-law will never pass an effectual Factory Bill, if
they can help it. Both of them are ultimately questions
of rent. The old Poor-law charged the land, or, what
comes to the same thing, the process of production, with
certain expensive social duties. A good Factory Bill
might possibly involve greater freedom of trade. That
is all the landowner wishes to know about the matter.
Everybody can point to the localities, and the councils,
where the fate of the factory question has been decided,
for decided we believe it is, for this turn at least.
The cause does not fare much better with the manu-
facturer. Just now, perhaps, rather better; but there is
still the old story. "Do not limit labour, but remove
one burdens." For thirty years or more, two questions
have always presented themselves to a Lancashire mind
as a sort of disjunctive duality, viz., the factory cause,
and the duty on raw cotton. Innumerable meetings
have been held to consider petitions on these two sub-
jects ; and have universally ended in rejecting the peti-
tion for restricting factory labour, and unanimously re-
solving on that against that obnoxious import duty.
Last Tuesday a meeting was held at-Manchester osten-
sibly for the latter purpose only ;
and most pathetic was