n, so degrading was factory
employment considered to be. But the manufacturers had to get children
somehow, and they got them. They got them from the workhouses.
Pretending that they were going to apprentice them to a trade, they
arranged with the overseers of the poor regular days for the inspection
of these workhouse children. Those chosen were conveyed to their
destination, packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that moment were
doomed to the most awful form of slavery.

"Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer," says Gibbins,[14] "and transfer a number of children to a
factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who
would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities,
exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the
children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as
apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages and whom it
was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were
so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often
arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles,
that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane
children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of
the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but
we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of
the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their
labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had
been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often
worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night."

Terrible as this summary is, it does not equal in horror the account
given by "Alfred,"[15] in his "History of the Factory System": "In
stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirl of a thousand wheels,
little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced
into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the
merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments
of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable
selfishness." The children were fed upon the cheapest and coarsest food,
often the same as that served to their master's pigs. They slept by
turns, and in relays, in filthy beds that were nev