Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and more supersedes the work of men.  The human labour, involved in both spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the machine does all the rest.  This work requires no muscular strength, but only flexibility of finger.  Men are, therefore, not only not needed for it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore, naturally almost superseded by them.  Hence, the more the use of the arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or water-power, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their places.  In the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the throstles; among the mules one man, an adult spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes superfluous), and several piecers for tying the threads, usually children or women, sometimes young men of from eighteen to twenty years, here and there an old spinner {141} thrown out of other employment.  At the power-looms women, from fifteen to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however, rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year.  Among the preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames.  Besides all these, the factories employ numbers of children—­doffers—­for mounting and taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an engineer for the steam-engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual work of the mills is done by women and children.  This the manufacturers deny.

They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does not supersede adult male operatives.  According to these tables, rather more than half of all the factory-workers employed, viz., 52 per cent., were females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives more than half were over eighteen years old.  So far, so good.  But the manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the adults were men and how many women.  And this is just the point.  Besides this, they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and still they have not the courage to tell the whole truth.  These publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions, crooked statements, with calculations of averages, that prove a great deal for the uninitiated reader and nothing for the initiated, and with suppressions of facts bearing on the most important points; and they prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of the manufacturers concerned.  Let us take some of the statements of a speech with which Lord Ashley introduced the Ten Hours’ Bill, March 15th, 1844, into the