Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System: With Hints for the Improvement of Those Parts of it which are Most Injurious to Health and Morals ...

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Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817 - 20 pàgines
 

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Pàgina 5 - The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants*; and as this character is formed upon a principle quite unfavourable to individual or general happiness, it will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its tendency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction.
Pàgina 10 - ... they return to remain, in a majority of cases, till eight o'clock at night. The children now find they must labour incessantly for their bare subsistence : they have not been used to innocent, healthy, and rational amusements ; they are not permitted the requisite time, if they had been previously accustomed to enjoy them. They know not what relaxation means, except by the actual cessation from labour. They are surrounded by others similarly circumstanced with themselves ; and thus passing on...
Pàgina 7 - But the effects of this principle of gain, unrestrained, are still more lamentable on the working classes, those who are employed in the operative parts of the manufactures ; for most of these branches are more or less unfavourable to the health and morals of adults. Yet parents do not hesitate to sacrifice the well-being of their children by putting them to occupations by which the constitution of their minds and bodies is rendered greatly inferior to what it might and ought to be under a system...
Pàgina 10 - ... and inebriation ; for which their daily hard labour, want of better habits, and the general vacuity of their minds, tend to prepare them. Such a system of training cannot be expected to produce any other than a population weak in bodily and mental faculties, and with habits generally destructive of their own comforts, of the well-being of those around them, and strongly calculated to subdue all the social affections.
Pàgina 10 - Man so circumstanced sees all around him hurrying forward, at a mail-coach speed, to acquire individual wealth, regardless of him, his comforts, his wants, or even his sufferings, except by way of a degrading parish charity, fitted only to steel the heart of man against his fellows, or to form the tyrant and the slave. To-day he labours for one master, to-morrow for a second, then for a third, and a fourth, until all ties between employers and employed are frittered down to the consideration of what...
Pàgina 4 - The immediate effects of this manufacturing phenomenon were a rapid increase of the wealth, industry, population, and political influence of the British Empire ; and by the aid of which it has been enabled to contend for five-and-twenty years against the most formidable military and immoral power that the world perhaps ever contained.
Pàgina 9 - In the manufacturing districts it is common for pa^ rents to send their children of both sexes at seven or eight years of age, in winter as well as summer, at six o'clock in the morning, sometimes of course in the dark, and occasionally amidst frost and snow, to enter the manufactories, which are often heated to a high temperature, and contain an atmosphere far from being the most favourable to human life, and in which all those employed in them very frequently continue until twelve o'clock at noon,...
Pàgina 16 - ... their substantial advantages, and, by leading them into habits of the pot-house and inebriation, it has poisoned all their social comforts. Shall we then make laws to imprison, transport, or condemn to death, those who purloin a few shillings of our property, injure any of our domestic animals, or even a growing twig ; and shall we not make laws to restrain those, who otherwise will not be restrained, in their desire for gain, from robbing, in the pursuit of it, millions of our...
Pàgina 5 - The manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the British Empire as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people.
Pàgina 7 - All are sedulously trained to buy cheap a.id to sell dear ; and to succeed in this art, the parties must be taught to acquire strong powers of deception ; and thus a spirit is generated through every class of traders, destructive of that open, honest sincerity, without which , man cannot make others happy, nor enjoy happiness himself.

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