But negro slaves were not the only slaves in those days.  There were white slaves as well,—­women and children born in England, but condemned by their necessities to work underground in the coal mines, or to exhaust their strength in the cotton mills.  They were driven by brutal masters who cared as little for the welfare of those under them as the overseer of a West India plantation did for his gangs of black toilers in the sugar-cane fields.  On investigation it was found that children only six and seven years of age were compelled to labor for twelve and thirteen hours continuously in the factories.  In the coal mines their case was even worse.  All day long these poor creatures sat in absolute darkness, opening and shutting doors for the passage of coal cars.  If, overcome with fatigue, they fell asleep, they were cruelly beaten with a strap.[1]

[1] See Gibbin’s “Industrial History of England,” E.F.  Cheyney’s “Industrial History of England,” and Mrs. E. B. Browning’s poem, “The Cry of the Children.”

Parliament at length turned its attention to these abuses, and passed acts, 1833, forbidding the employment of women and young children in such work; a later act put an end to the barbarous practice of forcing children to sweep chimneys.

584.  The First Steam Railway, 1830; the Railway Craze; the Friction
     Match, 1834.

Ever since the application of steam to machinery, the inventors had been discussing plans for placing the steam engine on wheels and using it as a propelling power in place of horses.  Macadam, a Scotch surveyor, had constructed a number of very superior roads made of gravel and broken stone in the south of England, which soon made the name of “macadamized turnpike” celebrated.

The question then arose, Might not a still further advance be made by employing steam to draw cars on these roads, or, better still, on iron rails?  The first locomotives built were used in hauling coal at the mines in the North of England.  Puffing Billy, the pioneer machine (1813), worked for many years near Newcastle.  At length George Stephenson, an inventor and engineer, together with certain capitalists, succeeded in getting Parliament to pass an act for constructing a passenger railway between Liverpool and Manchester, a distance of about thirty miles.

When the line was completed by Stephenson, he had great difficulty in getting permission to use an engine instead of horse power on it.  Finally, Stephenson’s new locomotive, The Rocket,—­which first introduced the tubular boiler, and employed the exhaust, or escaping, steam to increase the draft of the fire,—­was tried with entire success.[1]

[1] Stephenson’s Rocket and Watt’s stationary steam engine (S563) are both preserved in the South Kensington Museum, London.  The boiler of the Rocket was traversed by a number of tubes communicating with the smoke pipe.  The steam, after it hada done its work in the cylinders of the engine, escaped with great force through the smoke pipe and so created a very powerful draft.  Without these two important improvements the locomotive would probably never have made an average speed of more than six or seven miles an hour.