ChildLabor and the Poor Laws
Benefits for individual families did not however necessarily lead to benefits for the working class as a whole. As Malthus correctly observed, an increase in the supply of labor would, all else equal, lower wages.
The supply of labor was increased not only by higher fertility but also by declines in mortality. Increased capacity to utilize the labor of young children also played a part. More than two-thirds of the workers in the early factories of Northern England were between the ages of seven and eighteen, working between fourteen and sixteen hours a day.24 Adults were, in a sense, in competition with children. Yet they were increasingly dependent on their own children’s earnings.The emerging textile industry was highly competitive, making it difficult for employers unwilling to utilize child labor to stay in business. One notable exception was Robert Owen, a benevolent yet upwardly mobile draper’s assistant who became a factory manager. The mills under his supervision in New Lanark, Scotland employed no children under the age of ten, limited working hours to ten and a half a day, and provided both schooling and medical services for its employees. They became a model for reform, and Owen became one of the influential spokesmen for the regulation of child labor (and also, as Chapter 11 will elaborate, a socialist).
A bill introduced in 1815 proposed to extend the New Lanark model to the United Kingdom as a whole, prohibiting the employment of young children and setting limits on the work day. In factory towns children’s earnings probably contributed as much to family income, overall, as any public assistance. Malthus quietly expressed support for some restrictions on child labor in the fifth edition of his Essay. Ricardo conspicuously failed to mention the issue, even in his published correspondence.25
The campaign to restrict child labor was couched in moral rather than economic terms.
But the landed gentry had less to lose from restrictions on factory employment than the rising class of industrialists. Humanitarians such as the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury threw their weight behind reform. Technological changes leading to increases in the intensity and skill required of factory work may have reduced the benefits of hiring children. A confluence of factors led to the passage of a Factory Act in 1833 that prohibited the employment of children under nine and limited children under twelve years to nine hours work per day.26 In 1844, somewhat stricter regulations were imposed. While less common in French factories, child labor came under regulation there in 1841.27The campaign to reform the Poor Laws, by contrast with the regulation of child labor, was framed in economic terms. Political economists, following Malthus’s lead, rallied to the cause, as did an eager contingent of Benthamite lawyers. Abolition of relief outside the workhouse was described as the only possible means of discouraging excessive population growth. Malthus suggested that restrictions should be phased in gradually. Ricardo was the more draconian, approving the recommendations of a Poor Law Commission of 1817, which suggested taking the children of the poor away from their parents, the better to provide for them.28 Elected to Parliament two years later, Ricardo used his inaugural speech to blast the existing system of poor relief.
Political economists took great pains to explain that their recommendations were motivated by their concern for the poor themselves. Theirs was not a callous view, they emphasized, but a scientific one. James Mill believed the causal effect of high fertility on low wages analogous to a proposition of Euclidean geometry.29 Ricardo compared the inevitable effects of the Poor Laws to the principle of gravitation.30 Malthus, as aforementioned, referred to the unfortunate vulnerability of mothers and young children as one of the invariable laws of nature. In 1834, the official report of the Poor Law Commission, influenced by the political economist Nassau Senior, recommended the abolition of all relief outside the workhouse. Parliament approved the recommendation. Many, though not all, parishes put new restrictive rules in place. Welfare had been reformed.