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| Billie Silvey |
| Three Reformers |
| April 2007 |
| Despite the fact that during the industrial revolution production was increased, money was pouring into the country, and some people were getting very rich, a few were concerned about those on the other end of the spectrum. People began to notice the horrible living conditions of the poor, the high death rates among children, and the dangers of long hours working among the machines that generated wealth. Reformers, with both religious and humanitarian motivations, tried to make things better. Robert Owen (1771-1858) Robert Owen was born in Wales, but when he was 10, his father sent him to work in a large drapers in Stamford, England. After three years, he moved to a drapers in London, where he worked until he was 16. |
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| At 19, he borrowed 100 pounds to go into business with an engineer, manufacturing spinning mules. When their partnership ended, Owen became a manager of a large spinning factory in Manchester. There he met David Dale, owner of Chorton Twist Company in New Lanark, Scotland, the largest cotton spinning business in Britain. They became close friends, and in 1799, Owen married Dale’s daughter, Caroline. With financial support from several businessmen from Manchester, Owen purchased Dale’s four textile factories in New Lanark for 60,000 pounds. The business grew rapidly. |
| But Owen wasn’t interested just in making money. He was convinced that a good environment would help produce rational and humane people. He strongly opposed physical punishment in schools and factories, and he banned it in his factory town of New Lanark. Dale had built houses close to his factories, and by the time Owen arrived, over 2,000 people lived in New Lanark village. At the time, children as young as five were working 13 hours a day in textile mills. Owen stopped employing children under 10 and reduced the labor of older children to 10 hours a day. He built nursery and infant schools for the younger children. Older children worked in the factory but attended secondary school part of the day. When Owen’s partners objected to his methods, he borrowed money from a local banker to buy their shares in the business. Then he sold the shares to people who agreed with his approach. He publicized his activities in a series of books to encourage other factory owners to do the same. In 1816, he appeared before Robert Peel’s House of Commons committee. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, Owen wrote: “The governing principle of trade, manufactures and commerce is immediate pecuniary gain. All are sedulously trained to buy cheap and 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.” Pointing out that manufacturing is “more or less unfavorable to the health and morals of adults," he wrote: “In the manufacturing districts it is common for parents to send their children of both sexes and 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, when an hour is allowed for dinner, after which they return to remain, in a majority of cases, till eight o’clock at night.” Asked by the Peel Committee why he thought it would be bad for the children to be employed below the age of 10, Owen pointed out that "there were 500 children, who had been taken from poor-houses . . . and those children were generally from the age of five and six to seven to eight. The hours at that time were 13. Although these children were well fed, their limbs were very generally deformed, their growth was stunted, and although one of the best schoolmasters was engaged to instruct these children regularly every night, in general, they made very slow progress, even in learning the common alphabet. I came to the conclusion that the children were injured by being taken into the mills at this early age and employed for so many hours." "If you do not employ children under ten, what would you do with them?" a committee member asked. "Instruct them, and give them exercise." "Would there be a danger of their acquiring, by that time, vicious habits, for want of regular occupation?" "My own experiences leads me to say that I found quite the reverse, that their habits have been good in proportion to the extent of their instruction." |
| Catharine (1829-1890) and William Booth (1829-1912) |
| Catharine Mumford had read the Bible all the way through eight times by the age of 12. She became a supporter of England's national Temperance Society while in her teens. William Booth's father, a nail maker, had been made redundant by the advances of the Industrial Revolution. "Make money," he told his son, but he died bankrupt. Both Catharine and William shared a passion for social reform, and they were married in 1855. William became a minister in London, where he took his message to "the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the destitute." He originally planned to send his converts to established congregations, but they scandalized the good church people by showing up unwashed and in ragged clothing. In 1865, the Booths established the Christian Mission, which was later called the Salvation Army. William continued his outreach to the poor, while Catharine reached out to the wealthy, raising funds for their work. She fought against the match making industry who employed women to dip match heads into yellow phosphorous, a toxic substance responsible for the early and painful death of many workers. She lobbied for the use of the safer but more expensive red phosphorous which is used in match making today. She also preached, because from the beginning, the Foundation Deed of the Christian Mission clearly stated that women had the same right to preach as men. In his book In Darkest England and the Way Out, William called his program to help the poor "The Cab Horse Charter" based on the principle that in England cab horses were better provided for than millions of poor people because they had "food, shelter, and work." By 1900, The Salvation Army had served 27 million meals, sheltered 11 million homeless people, found 18,000 missing persons, and found work for 9,000 unemployed people. William said, "The three S's best express the way in which the Army ministered to the 'down-and-outs': first, soup; second, soap; and finally, salvation." By William Booth's death, the Salvation Army had spread to 58 countries. |