EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Lawrence Reed
The decade after 1750 saw a huge economic shift in Britain. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution, marked by a colossal number of technical innovations, vast increases in productivity, a renaissance of world trade, and a rapid increase in urban population.
Historians and other analysts clash over the interpretation of these great changes. Whether they brought benefits to citizens or whether the events of this era were a hindrance to them. Perhaps no other issue has heated the intellectual atmosphere more than the topic of child labor. Critics of capitalism successfully present the problem as an irrefutable argument against the capitalist system that was emerging in England in the 19th century.
The many descriptions of poor working conditions and long hours of hard labor are certainly harrowing to read. William Cook Taylor describes the reformers of the era who, seeing children working in factories, thought to themselves, "How much more pleasant would be the tramp of free feet on the hills; the sight of green fields covered with bouquets of buttercups and daisies; the song of birds and the hum of bees."
Among the historians who denounce child labor in industrial England as a crime of capitalism, none is more prominent than John Lawrence Hammond and Barbara Hammond. Many of their works on the subject are widely promoted as “authoritative.”
The Hammonds divide children in factories into two classes: “municipal apprentices” and “free laboring children.” This distinction is of immense importance, although the authors themselves fail to appreciate it. Having divided the children according to their classes, the two historians continue to consider them as if there were no difference between them. The result is a flood of erroneous and misleading conclusions about capitalism and child labor that continues for many years after the publication of their studies.
The “free” children were those who lived at home but worked during the day in factories at the insistence of their parents or guardians. The British historian E. P. Thompson, while generally critical of the factory system, nevertheless correctly points out that “it is perfectly true that not only did these parents need their children’s wages, but they also expected them to work.” The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises clearly noted that the deplorable living conditions up to the time of the Industrial Revolution and the low productivity that resulted from them encouraged families to embrace the new opportunities provided by the factories: “It is a distortion of the facts to say that the factories took away the housework and cooking from the women and the play from the children. These women had nothing with which to cook and feed their children. The children were miserable and starving. Their only salvation was the factories. They literally saved them from starvation.” [1]
Private factory owners were unable to force “free” children to work in conditions that their parents found unacceptable. The mass exodus from continental Europe to increasingly capitalist England in the first half of the 19th century is clear evidence that people did indeed find the industrial system an attractive alternative. At the same time, we find no evidence that parents in these early capitalist days were any less caring for their children than parents in pre-capitalist eras.
The situation was very different for apprentices, however. A close analysis reveals that it is precisely on this group that critics focus when describing the “evils” of the capitalist Industrial Revolution. It turns out that the young people were under the direct control and supervision not of their parents in the free market, but of state officials. Most were orphans, and a few were victims of neglectful parents or of parents whose health or lack of skills prevented them from earning enough to support their families. All children in this category were under the control of the “municipal authorities.” As Hammond himself describes it, “the first mills were built next to streams, and the necessary labor was provided by bringing in whole carts of poor children from the workshops of the big cities. … To the municipal authorities, burdened with large numbers of unwanted children, the new cotton mills in Lancashire, Derby, and Notts were a godsend.”
Although they were under government control, these children are often portrayed as victims of capitalist greed. But as historian Robert Hesse writes, these children “were literally sent into slavery by the government; among them were abandoned or orphaned children who were legally in the care of the poor in the boroughs, and who were bound by long-term unpaid apprenticeships in exchange for a basic subsistence.” In fact, the first child labor laws in England were aimed at protecting this group of children, not free laborers.
While it is wrong to blame capitalism for the sins of municipal child labour schemes, it would be equally wrong to assume that free-labouring children worked in ideal conditions in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. By modern standards, their situation was indeed poor. However, over time conditions improved considerably thanks to the achievements of capitalism, including ventilation and high labour productivity. The case for capitalism is therefore absolutely clear: from 1750 to 1850, when Britain's population almost tripled, the only sensible choice for people immigrating to the country in search of work was to work for private capitalists.
Working conditions and hygiene were at their best in the larger, newer factories, as the Factory Commission report of 1833 indicated. The owners of the new businesses, who were often subject to inspection and visits by inspectors, increasingly chose not to employ children, rather than having to operate under strict, arbitrary and ever-changing rules about how they could manage factories employing young people. The result of legislative intervention was that children who were released from work, most of whom had to work to survive, were forced to seek work in smaller, older and more remote factories where hygiene, lighting and safety were much worse. Those who were unable to find new work were left in the same position as their peers a century earlier – that is, they took to irregular and exhausting agricultural labor or, in Mises' words, "went about the country en masse as idlers, beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes."
Child labor was freed from its worst burdens not by legislative coercion but by the progressive march of an ever more productive capitalist system. It was literally eliminated when, for the first time in history, the productivity of parents in the free market increased to a point where it was no longer economically necessary for children to work in order to survive. The emancipators and benefactors of children were not legislators or municipal inspectors but factory owners and financiers. Their efforts and investments in machinery led to rising real wages, an abundance of food at lower prices, and an incomparable improvement in the general standard of living.
The original text in English can be found here.
[1] A short essay by Ludwig von Mises on the effects of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution on the population of Europe can be read here.
