Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/277

Rh elementary education in the modern sense was carried through Parliament in 1802—just a century before the great statute of last year. The factory act of 1803 was intended to deal with the health and morals of children employed in cotton and other mills and factories. The state of the children in these factories and mills was deplorable: ignorant beyond all imagination; housed under conditions subversive of all health, of all morality; working by methods that involved the stagnation of intelligence; these children presented a fearful problem and constituted a positive menace to the future of society. The act of 1803 was passed without discussion: it directed the mill rooms to be whitewashed twice a year and to be ventilated; it ordered an apprentice to have one suit of clothes a year and not to work more than twelve hours a day exclusive of meal times; it forbade work between nine at night and six in the morning; it provided that male and female apprentices should sleep in separate rooms and not more than two apprentices should sleep in one bed; it made medical attendance compulsory in case of infectious disease; it directed the mills to be inspected by visitors appointed by the justices and ordered the children to be taught the elements of knowledge and the principles of Christianity. It is an awful picture; a picture for which the discovery of machinery and of the usefulness of children in machine work are responsible. This reformatory measure was petitioned against in the following year by both manufacturers and parents and it was never enforced. Many generations of little, seven-year-old slaves—the thought is heart-breaking—were to be worn away in the mills before, late in the century, effective relief came. Until 1878 children under nine years of age could be employed in silk mills. At the present time every child in the country—who is not specially exempt on the ground of adequate private teaching, sickness, inaccessibility of school, or other reasonable excuse—is compelled to attend school full time between the ages of five and at least twelve years (save in the case of children employed in agriculture when the child may be partially exempted at eleven). Moreover every local education authority may make by-laws compelling attendance up to the age of fourteen years. The child can, however, be employed during holidays or during hours when the school is not open; and this is a source of abuse. A child can not do his school work and school play and also be an up-hill down-dale errand boy. However, the change in the matter of child labor is remarkable since that year of grace 1803 and it may be admitted that some forms of employment in non-school hours are better than idleness with its concomitant evils.

From this time parliamentary interest in educational matters increased very rapidly. Mr. Whitbread's bill of 1807 provided for the establishment of schools and the appointment of schoolmasters by