Note 187 — Chapter XXI · LABOR AND LABOR PROBLEMS

“The children were kept working for fourteen, and even sixteen, hours a day; they were beaten for the slightest mistake or offence; and sometimes they were tortured by the overseers, who would tie them to a beam close over the whirling machines by way of teaching them to hold their feet up, or would rivet irons on their ankles and hips to teach them not to try to run away. Locked in the factory while they worked, and in neighboring barracks while they slept, these pitiful martyrs were as absolutely abandoned by their kind as though they had been adult convicts on the way to Botany Bay, or negro slaves on the middle passage.” G. H. Perris, The Industrial History of Modern England, p. 207.