Your daily installment from the Paragraphs That Provoke Uncontrollable Wincing Dep't:
The burgeoning English textile industry solved its labor problems during the latter part of the eighteenth century by using parish children, some only four or five years old, as factory operatives. Manufacturers negotiated regular bargains with the parish authorities, ordering lots of fifty or more children from the poorhouses. (In at least one known instance, a Lancashire manufacturer agreed to the stipulation of a London parish that he take at least one idiot for every twenty sound children delivered.)
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the poor: the functions of public welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p. 27 (emphasis added).
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