Reading Factory Testimony: What the Witness Assumes

In practice

Read Sadler in three moves. Who speaks: a reformer in parliament, not a worker, urging regulation of children's hours. What he reports: parents who surrender their children to what he calls infantile slavery, most from extreme indigence, because the overseer refuses relief to families with children who could work; children roused in the winter dark, returned fatigued hours after nightfall, drooping, crippled, dying before their prime. What he wants: a ten-hour limit, the demand the Factory Act of thirty-three partly and the Ten Hours Act of forty-seven fully answered. Then read the reply the witness sets beside it: Hope argues that child labor is not necessarily an evil and should not be regulated, the position of the mill owners.