Although no slaves were owned in England, slavery still existed in her colonies. In the West Indies the whip was freely used, and prior to the year 1820 no voice had been raised against the flogging of women on the plantations. In Scotland, down to the last year of the eighteenth century, colliers and salters were slaves and bound to their service for life, being bought and sold with the works at which they laboured. Although America had put down the slave-trade, she still owned slaves, and continued to traffic in them until the year 1863.
The history of legislation during the historic period shows that it has ever been in the interest of the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak. In France, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, liberty was extinct. “The rich man could purchase for money the power to destroy those whom he hated.”[264]
[264] Robert Mackenzie, _The Nineteenth Century_, p. 9.
The lawmakers of the age which we are considering were gentlemen landowners, and as such were able to exercise their cupidity in a degree which precluded all idea of justice to the poorer classes. The abuses of government, the corn-laws, the enormous tax on salt and on the various necessities of life, show somewhat of the extent to which the poor were systematically robbed by the rich.
The law passed in 1350, at Bannockburn, regulating the movements of the British workingmen, and which prohibited combinations among them, was in force until 1824. The evident object of this law was to repress the labourer and deprive him of his just earnings. Although this enactment was known to be oppressive, the working-classes were not possessed of sufficient influence to cause its repeal.
In England, women with their children worked in coal pits, and in the darkness, on hands and feet, dragged about wagons fastened to their waists by chains. Of this Mr. Mackenzie says:
Children of six were habitually employed. Their hours of labour were fourteen to sixteen daily. The horrors among which they lived induced disease and early death. Law did not seem to reach to the depths of a coal-pit, and the hapless children were often mutilated and occasionally killed with perfect impunity by the brutalized miners among whom they laboured. There was no machinery to drag the coals to the surface, and women climbed long wooden stairs with baskets of coal upon their backs.