The phrase “what can pass for 13 years,” has reference to the fact, that by the Factory Act, children under
 13 years may work only 6 hours. A surgeon officially appointed must certify
 their age. The manufacturer, therefore, asks for children who look as if
 they were already 13 years old. The decrease, often by leaps and bounds
 in the number of children under 13 years employed in factories, a decrease
 that is shown in an astonishing manner by the English statistics of the
 last 20 years, was for the most part, according to the evidence of the
 factory inspectors themselves, the work of the certifying surgeons, who
 overstated the age of the children, agreeably to the capitalist’s greed
 for exploitation, and the sordid trafficking needs of the parents. In the
 notorious district of Bethnal Green, a public market is held every Monday
 and Tuesday morning, where children of both sexes from 9 years of age upwards,
 hire themselves out to the silk manufacturers. "The usual terms are 1s. 8d. a week (this belongs to the parents) and ‘2d. for myself and tea.’ The contract is binding only for the week. The scene and language while
 this market is going on are quite disgraceful.” [42]
 It has also occurred in England, that women have taken “children from the
 workhouse and let any one have them out for 2s. 6d. a week.” [43] In spite of legislation, the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney-sweeping machines (although there exist
 plenty of machines to replace them) exceeds 2,000. [44] The revolution effected by machinery in the juridical relations between the buyer and the seller of labour-power, causing the transaction as a
 whole to lose the appearance of a contract 375between free persons,
 afforded the English Parliament an excuse, founded on juridical principles,
 for the interference of the state with factories. Whenever the law limits
 the labour of children to 6 hours in industries not before interfered with,
 the complaints of the manufacturers are always renewed. They allege that
 numbers of the parents withdraw their children from the industry brought
 under the Act, in order to sell them where “freedom of labour” still rules,
 i.e., where children under 13 years are compelled to work like grown-up
 people, and therefore can be got rid of at a higher price. But since capital
 is by nature a leveller, since it exacts in every sphere of production
 equality in the conditions of the exploitation of labour, the limitation
 by law of children’s labour, in one branch of industry, becomes the cause
 of its limitation in others.