Sadler report

In committee hearings carried out between the passage of the Reform Act 1832 and Parliament's subsequent dissolution, Sadler had elicited testimony from factory workers (current and former), concerned medical men, and other bystanders.

Instead, Parliament voted for a fresh inquiry through a Factory Commission, which visited the principal manufacturing districts and took evidence on oath (unlike the select committee).

However, it concluded that children were working excessively long hours and government intervention to regulate child labour in textile trades was therefore called for.

Whilst these caveats cannot be ignored "Critics have alleged that some of the evidence was biased, incomplete, sometimes inaccurate or even deliberately misleading, and it is true that a good deal of it referred to conditions that had long been ameliorated...When every allowance has been made for exaggerations and omissions and the rest, the 'report' stands as one of the classic documents of British social history".

"[18] The report of the committee was greeted with acclaim by the ten-hour movement, "At last the London Press is fairly aroused to the atrocities of this infernal system, which is at once the curse and scandal of the land.

[22] Others were more sceptical, noting very leading questioning, and suspecting the picture of misery to be too highly coloured, but they still concluded the factory system was little better than slavery, and legislation was urgently needed.

From these exclusive and exparte data, however, with more zeal than candour, our contemporaries take upon themselves to denounce the whole body of manufacturers or millowners, as alike obnoxious to the charge of the most flagrant cruelty, in order to gratify their inordinate cupidity.

We are far from assuming, that there are not evils connected with our manufacturing system, which it is imperative to remedy; or denying, that in many mills there are practices, particularly as affecting the most helpless of those there employed – the children – which ought to be prevented by the arm of the law:[d] but we consider it unjust to adduce isolated cases, and on those alone to condemn the whole of the trade.

In our own town, we are gratified to testify, no such cruelties and privations are, to our knowledge, practised in any one establishment; and the neat, clean, and wholesome appearance of the numerous young females in particular, (whose constitutions would most likely be readily affected by inordinate labour) warrant the assumption that they are not subjected to the hardships complained of in the cases alluded to.

It might be supposed that the examination of these eighty witnesses would have given full evidence with respect to the state of every district of the country—every branch of trade—all the evils, and all the most eligible remedies but no such thing had resulted.

They reported[28]: 35–36  that mill children did work unduly long hours, leading to: and that these ill-effects were so marked and significant that Government intervention was justified.

[28]: 35–36 Sadler had suggested (in his subsequently much-anthologised examination of Matthew Crabtree – see above) that you could hardly be in a mill without hearing constant weeping and that towards the end of a working day 'chastisement' was going on perpetually.

A Scottish commissioner reported that "We had, I believe, during our progress no one intimation, even anonymously, to direct our inquiries to any quarter where any habitual ill-usage of children was insinuated to exist at present."

The Commission's report went on to counter any unfavourable opinion of millowners readers of Sadler's report might have formed by drawing attention to various instances of the benevolence towards their employees of major millowners such as the Strutts, to compare working conditions for children with those in other industries (after a visit to the coal mine at Worsley one of the Commission staff had written "as this was said to be the best mine in the place, I cannot much err in coming to the conclusion, that the hardest labour in the worst-conducted factory is less hard, less cruel, and less demoralizing than the labour in the best of coal-mines"[5]: 152 [28]: D2, 79–82 ) and to comment adversely on the methods and true motives of the Ten-Hour Movement.

The Blackburn Standard – a Conservative paper published in a Lancashire milltown – declared its support (and hence implicitly a view that the Factory Commission recommendations had not gone far enough).

However, the Standard did not base its support on Sadler's report and was scathing on about those whose arguments for the new Bill relied heavily on the more lurid evidence in Sadler's report: …However true it may be that the barbarities which it so pathetically and powerfully deplores were practised some years ago in the woollen mills of Yorkshire, they are altogether unknown in the present day in the cotton mills of Lancashire, and the operative classes of society are of course not so degraded and oppressed as insinuated.

We do not approve of any attempt to insure the objects of the "emancipators" by exciting the prejudices and stimulating the passions of the multitude... We have visited many of the mills in this vicinity, and have been surprised and delighted with the cleanliness and order which they exhibit, and the comparative ease and cheerfulness with which the children perform their certainly by no means laborious occupation.

Still we are advocates for the Ten Hours' Bill, because we conceive that the atmosphere of a heated factory is not the best calculated for the preservation of health – that the children, mostly females, ought to have some opportunity for breathing the pure air of liberty, for acquiring habits of domestic usefulness, and for receiving religious and moral instruction.

The facts brought before the Committee were so strong and unanswerable,' he said, 'that although they might go into a long and extensive investigation on the other side and might prove that some of the master manufacturers were disposed to acts of kindness and humanity, that could never overturn the mass of fearful evidence which had been submitted'