Labour is generally irksome to man; it is seldom persevered in after
the period of its necessity has passed. When parents find that, by
sending three or four children out to the mills or into the mines,
they can get eighteen or twenty shillings a-week without doing any
thing themselves, they soon come to abridge the duration and cost of
education, in order to accelerate the arrival of the happy period
when they may live on their offspring, not their offspring on them.
Thus the purest and best affections of the heart are obliterated on
the very threshold of life. That best school of disinterestedness and
virtue, the _domestic hearth_, where generosity and self-control are
called forth in the parents, and gratitude and affection in the
children, from the very circumstance of the dependence of the latter
on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than destroyed, it is made
the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists only to nourish
the selfish and debasing passions. Children come to be looked on, not
as objects of affection, but as instruments of gain; not as forming
the first duty of life and calling forth its highest energies, but as
affording the first means of relaxing from labour, and permitting a
relapse into indolence and sensuality. The children are, practically
speaking, sold for slaves, and--oh! unutterable horror!--_the sellers
are their own parents_! Unbounded is the demoralization produced by
this monstrous perversion of the first principles of nature. Thence
it is that it is generally found, that all the beneficent provisions
of the legislature for the protection of infant labour are so
generally evaded, as to render it doubtful whether any law, how
stringent soever, could protect them. The reason is apparent. The
parents of the children are the chief violators of the law; for the
sake of profit they send them out, the instant they can work, to the
mills or the mines. Those whom nature has made their protectors, have
become their oppressors. The thirst for idleness, intoxication, or