CHAPTER XIX

"FRIEND-LOVE-SOCIETY'S" GRIM TALE

The psychology of behaviour teaches us that [a country's] failures and
semi-failures are likely to continue until there is a far more
widespread appreciation of the importance of studying the forces which
govern behaviour.--SAXBY

I


I do not think that some of the factory proprietors are conscious that
they are taking undue advantage of their employees. These men are just
average persons at the ante-Shaftesbury stage of responsibility
towards labour.[144] Their case is that the girls are pitifully poor
and that the factories supply work at the ruling market rates for the
work of the pitifully poor. Said one factory owner to me genially:
"Peasant families are accustomed to work from daylight to dark. In the
silk-worm feeding season they have almost no time for sleep. Peasant
people are trained to long hours. Lazy people might suffer from the
long hours of the factory, but the factory girls are not lazy."

It hardly needs to be pointed out that there is all the difference
between a long day at the varied work of a farm, even in the trying
silk-worm season, and a long day, for nine or ten months on end,
sitting still, with the briefest intervals for food, in the din and
heat of a factory. Such a life must be debilitating. When it is added
that in most factories, in the short period between supper and sleep,
and again during the night, the girls are closely crowded, no further