FACTORY ACTS. In 1873, the royal commission on factory and workshop acts reported that previous legislation had been to a large extent successful; and that, while some occupations were still undoubtedly unhealthy in spite of the sanitary regulations of these acts, the cases in which young children were employed in labor unfitted for their years, or in which young persons and women suffered physically from overwork, had become uncommon. The commissioners, however, proposed large changes in the law, and in particular they proposed the consolidation of the law, which was then dis persed through fifteen statutes, one of them, passed in the year 1802, requiring all apprentices in cotton and woolen factories to be instructed in the principles of the Christian religion. This has been accomplished by the factory and workshop act, 1878. 41 Vict. c. 16, which deals with five classes of works: (1) Textile factories, which remain very much under the regulations enacted by the factory acts of 1844, 1861, and 1874: (2) Non-textile factories, which include the occupations enumerated in the factory acts extension act, 1864, and the workshops act, 1867, whether using mechanical power or not, and also all occupations, not named in these acts, in which mechanical power is used: (3) Workshops, or all unnamed occupations, in which mechanical power is scot used, except those named in the acts of 1864 and 1867: (4) Workshops in which none but women above the age of eighteen are employed: (5) Domestic workshops, in which the work is carried on in a private house, room, or place in which the only persons employed are members of the same family dwelling there. In class (1), where power is used, and the large majority of workers are women and children, the highest degree of regulation is reached. In class (2), where the labor is not so hard, or the strain of attendance on the moving power not so heavy, the statutory hours of work are some what relaxed, but education and sanitary provisions are still compulsory. In class (3), registers of children and young persons, and certificates of age and fitness, are, except in special circumstances, dispensed with. In class (4), the hours for work and meals may be changed, and the sanitary authority is responsible for the sanitary state of the shop. In class (5), there is still greater elasticity as regards hours for work and meals; the medical officer of health inspects the sanitary condition, but the employment of women is entirely unrestricted. The chief textile factories are those for the manufac
ture of cotton, wool, hair, silk, flax, hemp, jute, tow, China-grass, cocoa-nut fiber, or similar materials, either separately or in combination, or of any fabric made from these materials. The chief non-textile factories are print works, bleaching and dyeing works, earthenware works, lucifer-match, percussion-cap, and cartridge works, paper-staining works, fustian-cutting works, blast-furnaces, copper and iron mills, foundries of all kinds, metal and india-rubber works, paper-mills (including mills for converting cotton waste into half-stuff), glass works, tobacco factories, letter-press printing works, book binding works, and flax seutch-mills. The expreSsion non-textile factory also includes any premises in which manual labor is exercised in making, repairing, altering, orna menting, or adapting for sale any article,' and in which the manufacturing process is assisted by mechanical power. A workshop, again, is any premises, room, or place where manual labor is exercised for these purposes, and to which the employer of the persons working there has the right of access, or over which he has a right of control. The following premises or places are considered to be non-textile factories, if they have mechanical power to aid the manufacturing process; workshops, if they have not— namely, hat works, rope works (where mechanical power is not used to draw and spin the fibers), bakehouses, lace warehouses (where the process is entirely subsequent to the making of lace on a lace machine), ship-building yards, quarries, and pit-banks (not under the restrictions of the coal mines regulation act). A place used 'solely as a dwelling, a part of a factory used solely for some purpose different from the process carried on in the factory, and a school, are not considered to be workshops or factories. Straw-plaiting, pillow lace-making, glove-making, and some other handicrafts of alight character, may be carried on by a family in a private house or room, without fixing on the premises the legal liability of a workshop. Again, if the manual labor is exercised only at irregular intervals, and does not furnish the principal means of living to the family, the house will not become a workshop. The act does not apply to persons merely engaged to repair machinery in a factory.