much in producing that result as the merely leaving things to their own courses and operations.”[27] The skilled craftsmen, on the other hand, petitioned in favour of compulsory apprenticeship. But in the growing enthusiasm for the theory whose sole tenet lay in the belief that the haven of prosperity lay in the mid-ocean of uncontrolled liberty, all pleas in favour of regulation were treated with contempt. The famous Chalmers, speaking of the Statute of Apprentices, declared that “this law, so far as it requires apprenticeship, ought to be repealed, because its tendency is to abolish and to prevent competition among workmen.”[28]

In the year 1814 the Statute of Apprentices was repealed;[29] and with its repeal the State washed its hands of all responsibility for the well-being of the youth of the land. Henceforth things were to be left “to their own courses and operations.” It is no doubt true that there remained the “Health and Morals of Apprentices Act,” passed in 1802; this Act prescribed certain conditions as to hours of work and sanitation. But the Act in itself was utterly “ineffective,”[30] and for all practical purposes employers were unfettered in their use or misuse of children.

There remained one more blow to be struck before the condition of the boy touched the lowest level of misery reached in the whole history of this country; and it was soon struck with that relentless vigour which marked the actions of the reformer in those times.

After the repeal of the Statute of Apprentices there was for the lad no sort of legal guarantee of training, no kind of State supervision over his conduct; he could work how and when it pleased him or his parents. But the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 made it necessary for him to work how and when it pleased his employer, and took from him all possibility of effective choice. This Act abolished the allowance system in aid of wages. Salutary and even necessary as some reform of the kind was, in the particular way in which it was carried out it fell with crushing force on the unfortunate children. Hitherto parents could receive so much per child out of the rates; from henceforth this was to be illegal. Wages indeed rose, but rose slowly and in patches. The earnings of the child were required to make existence even possible for the family. A foreign and impartial student of English affairs has made this truth abundantly clear: “Even granted that the labourer himself now needed no allowance, what had he in place of the allowance for his family and the out-of-work relief? Something in place of these he must have, for even labourers’ families must live.... What was the way out? The labourer must sell more labour power; and since his own was already sold, he must put that of his family upon the market. This was how the problem of the married man was solved.... We have already seen that the expansion of the gang system took place mainly after 1834; it appears that the exploitation of child-labour and women’s labour is the main characteristic of the period between the Poor Law and the Education Acts. When Dr. Kay was examined before the Lords’ Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act, he described the astonishment of travellers at the number of women and children working in the fields, and traced their increased employment to the Poor Law. In his own words: ‘The extent of employment for women and children has most wonderfully increased since the Poor Law came into operation. It has had that effect by rendering it necessary that the children should be so employed in order to adjust the wages to the wants of the family....’ And a country clergyman gave expression to similar views in 1843: ‘By these allowances their children were not then obliged, as now, to work for their subsistence. Their time was at their own disposal; and then they were sent more regularly to the schools. But since the new Poor Law this has been reversed.’”[31]

Those persons who nowadays talk genially of the ease with which the new Poor Law was enforced, would do well to remember that the ease was purchased at the high price of the physical and moral deterioration of the children. Chalmers had got his way, there was now free competition among the workmen; and free competition among the workmen meant then, as it has always meant since, the unregulated slavery of the weak.

With the repeal of the Statute of Apprentices and the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act, the old apprenticeship system came to an end. No longer capable of being controlled in the common interests of the trade and the community, no longer capable of being enforced by statutory enactment, the apprenticeship system in its ancient form, though it might linger among certain industries, was destined slowly to disappear. We may regret its disappearance, as the vanishing of a fragment of an old-world life; but repinings are idle unless directed toward the search for some substitute adequate to the needs of the present.

CHAPTER III

THE AGE OF RECONSTRUCTION

The last chapter closed on the darkest scene in the long history of child labour in this country. Of the three factors essential to a true apprenticeship, not one was found or its need even recognized in the wild riot of the industrial revolution. Of public or organized supervision of the youth of the land there was not a trace. The controlling influence of the gild system had long since disappeared; the powers of regulation that lay in the Statute of Apprentices and the Elizabethan Poor Law had been withdrawn; free and unrestricted traffic in the use of children was the watchword of the age. Babies of four and five years worked alongside the adult and for the same number of hours; there were persons of intelligence who saw in this gain extracted from infants not the least of the triumphs of the day. Children’s lives were often a mere alternation of two kinds of darkness—the darkness of night giving place to the darkness of the mine. Boys and girls were hired out in troops to a taskmaster, herded in barns regardless of the claims of health and decency, and driven in gangs into the fields of the farmer. Whether in the mine or the factory or on the farm, the present profits of the employer, and not the future welfare of the race, were alone considered. Industrial training throughout the new manufacturing districts was treated with open contempt. A person, the masters urged, could learn the trade in a few months; while as for the provision of an opening that would lead from the work of the youth to the work of the adult, it was not to be imagined that a subject of this complexity should receive attention at a time when the narrow circuit of the prosperous factory set a limit to the horizon of men’s thoughts. In short, over the whole field of industry the desire for immediate