The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-01-22 00:00:00

THE FACTORY SYSTEM.

We this day present to our readers further evidence
of the existence in England of a system which, for the
atrocious brutality whicn it calls into action, and the phy-
sical suffering and moral degradation it produces, has,
we sincerely believe, never had a parallel in the most
revolting practices of the most barbarous and savage
nations.
We willingly encounter the risk of being thought tedi-
ous and importunate upon this subject. The whole
thing is so monstrous that nothing, we are persuaded,
short of a constant recurrence to the incontestable evi- •
dence by which the facts of the case are established will
be sufficient to convince those who have never witnessed
the operation of The factory system, that in England—in
the country of sincere and unaffected benevolence—in a
country where the principles of genuine religion are
supposed, as we believe truly, to exercise a very exten-
sive influence—in a country which possesses thousands
of philanthropists so eager to search for and to relieve
human suffering and degradation, that they cross the
Atlantic in order to find them, and assume their existence
where they are not—hundreds of thousands of children
are condemned from their birth to a species of slavery
which of necessity involves the extreme of physical and
moral suffering—which produces infallibly bodily, and
mental decrepitude—which drags, by a compulsion more
cogent than the driver's lash, its helpness victims through
a life of vice and torture to a premature and unhallowed
tomb. We feel it to be our duty to compel our readers to
dwell upon the details of this faithful picture, lest they
should deem it no more than a hideous and frightful
illusion.
This is no wanton infliction of unnecessary or useless
pain. The humane and Christian people of England
must be taught to realize to their own imaginations all
the horrors to which this abominable system gives birth,
as a means of inducing them to exert the necessary
efforts to ensure its speedy and complete extinction.
The children of the poor of England must be emanci-
pated from the horrible slavery to which so many of them
are now condemned from the cradle. This is an object
for which it is worth while to incur the risk of being
deemed tedious and importimate ; and it is an object
for which the interests of individual cupidity, and the
vanity of short-sighted and callous political science, or
of that concatenation of silly notions which it is the
fashion to flatter with the name of political science, will,
it is now plain, labour strenuously and conjointly to im-
pede. We have, however, no apprehension as to the
result; the final triumph of humanity and justice is
secure; but yet victory is not to be won without zealous
and persevering_ exertions, and on our part they shall not
be wanting. Let the factory system be once thoroughly
understood, and its workings clearly perceived by the
mass of the people of England, and the defensive ex-
cuses and palliations which cruel selfishness or cold-
blooded theory may attempt to throw around it will be
found a feeble, and ineffectual protection to the gigantic
and abominable enormity.
In order to accelerate the speedy and complete extinc-
tion of this horrible system of oppression and barbarity,
it is desirable that the nation should make its sentiments
known .to the legislature by means of petitions from
every part of the country. The system, abominable as
it is, has friends—friends among those who by its means
have become rich, and' who being rich are powerful—
friends scarcely less numerous, and perhaps still more
influential, in those who know that the theoretic princi-
ples with respect to trade and public wealtr, on the
practical success of which they have staked whatever
reputation they possess, will receive a fatal blow when-
ever this system of melting the bones and sinews of the
poor, and destroying their health and their minds, in the
production of cheap articles for exportation, shall be
finally abolished. I'he system, therefore, we may be
sure, will not fall without a desperate struggle in its de-
fence, and for this struggle it is incumbent upon the
friends'of humanity to prepare themselves. We hope
and expect that ere long committees will be formed in
all the principal towns in England, to act in unison with
a central committee in the metropolis, for the purpose of
diffusing information upon a subject so deeply important
to the national character and welfare, and of bringing
the national feelings and opinions fairly to bear upon the
legislature.
There is one class of persons to whom we would more
especially address ourselves upon this subject, and it is a
class to whom we do not venture to ofler a suggestion
upon such an occasion without great and undissembled
diffidence. We mean the parochial clergy of 'the church
of England. It has been the uniform practice of this ex.
cellent and discreet body to abstain from direct inter-
ference upon subjects of immediate public importance,
preferring, most wisely and judiciously, that course
of general admonition and instruction by which their
hearers are gradually fitted and disposed to the discharge
of their duties as citizens and men upon every occasion
or emergency. In a country like England, where every
subject of discussion or of interest assumes more or less
a tinge of party politics, this general abstinence on the
part of ministers of religion from interference with prac-
tical or secular affairs in the discharge of their pastoral
office is probably the only means by which they could
invariably protect themselves from misconstructions in-
jurious to the usefulness and efficacy of their labours.
Such considerations do not appear to us, however, to ap-
ply to a case like that which we now humbly but earnest-
ly recommend to the zealous attention of the
.clergy of
the Church of England, and which it is plain to every un-
biassed understanding that humanity and religion are
arrayed on one side, and nothing but individual`Selfish-
ness and the foolishness of theoretic conceit on the other.
If there were no more to recommend the evil we have
been describing to their most strenuous hostility, this
alone would be sufficient, that it is proved beyond the
possibility of contradiction or dispute that one
.of the in-
tallible consequences of the system is to reduce all the
childlen who are subjected to its influence to an utter
incapacity of deceiving moral or religious instruction, or
even of attending at all upon the stated ordinances of
religion.—Morning Post.

We present our readers with some further extracts
from that painful and distressing volume, "The Report
of the Factories' Regulation Inquiry," the record of in-
fant slavery, and more than infant torture. During the
forty days' investigation of the committee, and from the
lips of nearly a hundred witnesses who were examined,
we have learnt the existence and extent of a system of
cruelty and degradation to which a large portion of the
young of the workinc, classes in our manufacturing dis-
tricts are subjected, whichei almost makes us shudder at
the means by which our manufacturing superiority has
been acquired, and our immense Manufacturing wealth
accumulated. For the last forty years we have had nu-
merous examinations into the atrocities and abominations
of the colonial slave-trade, and into the hardships and
horrors of colonial slavery. The former has been abo-
lished in consequence of the damning nature of the evi-
dence by which it was assailed ; and the latter, we trust,
will soon disappear amid the loud indignation of an en-
lightened and improving community. And shall the
scene of slavery, then, be transferred to the mother coun-
try ?—shall English infants be substituted, by the con-