The old enfeebling influences continue, while the work is added to them.
At nine years of age it is sent into the mill to work 6 1/ 2 hours (formerly 8, earlier still, 12 to 14, even 16 hours) daily, until the thirteenth year then twelve hours until the eighteenth year.
A nine-year-old child of a factory operative that has grown up in want, privation, and changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient clothing and unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working strength of a child brought up under healthier conditions. The result in the most favourable case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development, and consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution. These influences are at work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite so powerfully as upon those who succumb.
THE GREAT MORTALITY AMONG CHILDREN of the working class, and especially among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome conditions under which they pass their first years.
0 kommentar(er)
