er cool. There was
often no discrimination between the sexes, and disease, misery, and vice
flourished. Some of these miserable creatures would try to run away, and
to prevent them, those suspected had irons riveted on their ankles, with
long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to sleep and work
with them on, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this
brutal treatment. The number of deaths was so great that burials took
place secretly, at night, lest an outcry should be raised. Many of the
children committed suicide.

These statements are so appalling that, as Mr. R. W. Cooke-Taylor
says,[16] they would be "absolutely incredible" were they not fully
borne out by evidence from other sources. It is not contended, of
course, that conditions in all factories were as bad as those described.
But it must be said emphatically that there were worse horrors than any
here quoted, and equally emphatically that the very best factories were
only a little better than those described. Take, for instance, the
account given by Robert Owen of the conditions which obtained in the
"model factory" of the time, the establishment at New Lanark, Scotland,
owned by Mr. David Dale, where Owen himself was destined to introduce so
many striking reforms. Owen assumed control of the New Lanark mills on
the first day of the year 1800. In his "Autobiography,"[17] he gives
some account of the conditions which he found there, in the "best
regulated factory in the world," at that time. There were, says Owen,
about five hundred children employed, who "were received as early as six
years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later
age." They worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening,
and _then their education began_. They hated their slavery, and many
absconded. Many were dwarfed and stunted in stature, and when they were
through their "apprenticeship," at thirteen or fifteen years of age,
they commonly went off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, with no guardians,
ignorant and ready--"admirably suited," is Owen's phrase--to swell the
great mass of vice and misery in the towns. The people in New Lanark
lived "almost without control, in habits of vice, idleness, poverty,
debt, and destitution. Thieving was general." With such conditions
existing in a model factory, under a master whose benevolence was
celebrated everywhere, it can be very readily believed that conditions
elsewhere must have been abominable.