Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer, 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 oweners in the American markets.  After that the children were simply at the mercy of their oweners, 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 owener 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.

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to fourteen hours a day.  This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen.  It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order.  “Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, worshipper of the gods” ... so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B.C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis.  The duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the church’s every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds.  In the Litany the people petition for “increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word”; and here is this “Word,” as little children are made to learn it by heart.  If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know where to find it.

My duty towards my neighbour is ...  To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority under him; To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters:  To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters....  Not to covet nor desire other men’s goods; But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty