"The factory owners," writes Ludwig von Mises, "did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation."
Europe witnessed an explosion in population from the mid-to-late-eighteenth century through the nineteenth century that was without precedent in world history. Population doubled in England during the eighteenth century. The University of London’s T.S. Ashton, among the greatest twentieth-century historians of the Industrial Revolution, observed that the central problem of the first half of the nineteenth century therefore involved "how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children outnumbering by far those of any earlier time." His own work on industrialization, which focused on England, showed that industrialization, far from being a problem, was the solution to the pressing question of how to deal with this population explosion.
Catholics and Capitalism, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
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