ABSTRACT
Fourier is perhaps excessively eager to make the child selfsupporting as early as possible; but on this count he does not differ from most of his contemporaries. In England, at the time, children in their thousands, according to Robert Owen, were generally admitted into the cotton mills " ... some at five, many at six, and a greater number at seven", and worked "sixteen hours a day whenever the trade went well".2 Conditions in the French factories and mills were not dissimilar; there too children and adolescents suffered greatly.3
