The Daily empire. (Dayton, Ohio) 1865-1867, 1865-12-06
Mhite slnNery in Mnssachmsetts.

There is u general movement throughout
the country TO secure a reduction of the
legal day for labor to eight hours day.
The Massachusetts, Legislature has APP
pointed a committee to Investigate this
subject, On reading report of the do
ings OF this committee In Boston paper,
We lind this curious passage:
A discussion here arose among the COM
missioners as TO whether the testimony of
the parties from Fall River should be heard
since they had desired that their names
should not appear Ii was finally decided
that they should be heard.
The witnesses We're two men from Fall
River operatives in n factory Before
giving their testimony, they asked the re-
porters to suppress their names, as their
employers would throw them out of en-
ployment, If they knew they had been be-
fore the commission. One of them said:
1--WE work eleven hours a day; have
worked twenty years in the old country
and eight years here; had worked harder
in the last eight years than In the other
twenty; he has 10 walk from twenty to
twenty miles a day attending the
spinning jack, Till within three months
he had to work all the noon hard. cleaning
up, and had to get bites mt intervals from
his dinner kettle; now, this cleaning work
was only done on saturday. The operatives
have to work harder here than in England.
If a reduction of the hours of labor implied
a reduction of wages, he would still go for
it heart and soul. The machinery had to
be oiled before starting up, in addition to
the eleven hours. In some of the mills in
Fall River, little children were worked
eleven hours a day, and the law which pro-
hibits IL was not enforced; persons have
gone to parents TO get children from the
schools TO work in the mill; old Mr.. Robe
son, now dead, would not allow such a
thing In his mill"
The other gentleman then said
'l am spinner; have no education, and
am sorry for II he had two little boys, one
seven years and the other nine, who work
in the mill, getting 81 30 week, working
seventy hours Nahnet"c he could send his boys
to school; his condition as a factory oper-
ative was harder here than in England"
The last two witnesses stated that men
who had been prominent in movements for
fair wages had been discharged when the
other operatives had been Tr-emplOyed, and
travelling from place To place could get no
work when they did get IL, ii was only for
a few days, when they were discharged,
without any apparent cause, unless from
some secret understanding among the
owners of the mills.
This is NIassachusetts-"g "glorious, free.
Republican Massachusetts" where they
'shriek for freedom" from January to De
cember! And these are Massachusetts,
Jreemen-citizens of the Commonwealth
where Wendell Phillips lives and lectures
where Garrison continually bewails the
wrongs of the poor African-where Whit
tier sings oe,y sweetly of liberty-where
orators, and poets, and preachers, have for
the last quarter of century dwelt elo-
quently upon the ''terrors of slavery 1t
is strange that it has never occurred to
them to say word for the poor people
who toll in their factories, and are so nearly
slaves that they dare not allow their en-
ployees to know that they have said or done
any thing for the alleviation of their own
condition. The negro is free now. and
would 1t not be well for these bogus philan-
thropists and canting hypocrits to turn
their attention TO the relief of white peo-
pleY