night work the day work was
the longer. They were driven at their work and often abused. Their
food was of the coarsest description, and they were frequently
required to eat it while at their work, snatching a bite as they could
while the machinery was still in motion. Much of the time which
should have been devoted to rest was spent in cleaning the machinery,
and there seems to have been absolutely no effort made to give them
any education or opportunity for recreation.

The sad life of these little waifs, overworked, underfed, neglected,
abused, in the factories and barracks in the remote glens of Yorkshire
and Lancashire, came eventually to the notice of the outside world.
Correspondence describing their condition began to appear in the
newspapers, a Manchester Board of Health made a presentment in 1796
calling attention to the unsanitary conditions in the cotton factories
where they worked, contagious fevers were reported to be especially
frequent in the apprentice houses, and in 1802 Sir Robert Peel,
himself an employer of nearly a thousand such children, brought the
matter to the attention of Parliament. An immediate and universal
desire was expressed to abolish the abuses of the system, and as a
result the "Health and Morals Act to regulate the Labor of Sound
Children in Cotton Factories" was passed in the same year. It
prohibited the binding out for factory labor of children younger than
nine years, restricted the hours of labor to twelve actual working
hours a day, and forbade night labor. It required the walls of the
factories to be properly whitewashed and the buildings to be
sufficiently ventilated, insisted that the apprentices should be
furnished with at least one new suit of clothes a year, and provided
that they should attend religious service and be instructed in the
fundamental English branches. This was the first of the "Factory
Acts," for, although its application was so restricted, applying only
to cotton factories, and for the most part only to bound children, the
subsequent steps in the formation of the great code of factory
legislation were for a long while simply a development of the same
principle, that factory labor involved conditions which it was
desirable for government to regulate.

At the time of the passage of this law the introduction of steam power
was already causing a transfer of the bulk of factory industry from
the rural districts to which the need for water power had confined it