Oh, yes, very reasonable.
They had another law up for consideration, as well, a law that would allow the employers at these manufactories to set working hours around the clock, seven days a week. It seemed very reasonable again_and here was the example, right across the street. There was no reason why people couldn't be working all night, not with these wonderful, clear lights available. It would be no hardship to them, not the way working by candlelight or lamplight would be. It was the Church that opposed this law; it was the Church that decreed the hours during which it was permissible to work in the first place, and the conditions for working. Church law mandated that Sevenday be a day for rest and religious services. Church law forbade working after sundown, except in professions such as entertainment, on the grounds that God created the darkness in order to ensure that Man had peace in which to contemplate God and to sleep_or at least, rest from his labors, so he could contemplate God with his full attention.
The Manufactory Guild wanted a law that permitted them to hire children as young as nine, on a multitude of grounds_and Nightingale had heard them all.
So that children can be a benefit to their families, instead of a burden. So that families with many children can feed all of them instead of relying on charity. So that children can learn responsibility at an early age. To keep children out of the street and out of wickedness and idleness. Oh, it all sounds very plausible.
Except, of course, that one would not have to pay a child as much as an adult. A family desperate enough to force its nine-year-old child into work would be desperate enough to take whatever wage was offered. And that child, who supposedly was learning to read and write from his Chapel Priest, would be losing that precious chance at education. There were Church-sanctioned exceptions to the law_children were allowed to be hired as pages or messengers, and to help their parents in a business or a farm. But all of those exceptions were hedged about with a vast web of carefully tailored precepts that kept abuse of those exceptions to a relative minimum, and all those exceptions required that the child receive his minimum education.
You can't keep a child's parents from working him to death, or from abusing him in other ways, but you can at least keep a stranger from doing so. That was basically the reasoning of the Church, which decreed the completely contradictory precepts that a child was sacred to God and that a child was the possession and property of his parents.
Then there's that lovely little item, the "job security law." That was a law that specifically forbade a worker in a manufactory from quitting one job to take another_effectively keeping him chained to the first job he ever took for the rest of his life, unless his employer chose otherwise, or got rid of him. That one had yet to be passed as well, but there was very little opposition, and the moment it was, it would mean the complete loss of freedom for anyone who went to work in a manufactory.
They say that retraining someone is costly and dangerous, since folk in a manufactory are generally operating some sort of machinery. Oh, surely. "Machinery" no more complicated than a spinning wheel! But I would think that to most people, who think a well-pump is very complicated machinery, they'd look at the manufactories and agree that having an inexperienced person "operating machinery" could be very dangerous. As if most of what I've been watching people actually do was any more complicated than digging potatoes.
But the Manufactory Guild wanted to keep that ignorance intact. And here the Church itself was divided; one group saw clearly the way this would take freedom away from anyone who worked in those places, leaving them virtual slaves to their jobs, but the other group was alarmed at the wild tales painted of accidents caused by "inexperience," and was in favor of the law.
She shifted her position, turning her back on the lights of the manufactory to stare up at the sky. You didn't see as many stars here as you could in the country; she didn't know why. Maybe it was all the smoke from the thousands of chimneys, getting in the way, like a perpetual layer of light clouds.
The nastiest piece of work she'd heard about was something that so far was only a rumor, but it was chilling enough to have been the sole topic of conversation tonight, all over Freehold.
This was_supposedly_a proposed law that had the support of not only some of the Church but the Manufactory Guild and the Trade Guilds as well.
They called it "the Law of Degree."
Nightingale shivered, a chill settling over her that the warm breeze could not chase away. Even the name sounded ominous.
It would set a standard, a list of characteristics, which would determine just how "human" someone could be considered, based on his appearance. But the "standard" was only the beginning of the madness, for it would mandate that those who were considered to be below a certain "degree" of humanity were nothing more than animals.
In other words, property. Bad enough that such things as being indentured are allowed everywhere, and that slavery is sanctioned in at least half the Twenty Kingdoms. The Church at least has laws that govern how slaves are treated, and an indentured servant has the hope of buying himself free. But this_this would be slavery with none of the protections! After all, it wouldn't be "reasonable" to have a law stating that a man couldn't beat his dog, so why have one saying he can't beat his Mintak?
Deliambrens, for instance, would be considered human under the law_but Mintaks and Haspur, with their hides of hair and feathers, their nonhuman hands and feet, their muzzles and beaks, would be animals.
Some people were arguing that as property, these nonhumans would actually have protection they did not have now_protection from persecution by the Church. "Animals" by Church canon could not be evil, because they had no understanding of the difference between good and evil. It was also argued that some of the violence done to nonhumans in the past_the beatings and ambushes_would end if this law was passed, because since they would then be the property of a human, anyone harming one of them would have to pay heavy restitution to the owner.
Naturally all those nonhumans not falling within the proper degree of humanity would have their property confiscated_cattle can't own homes or businesses, of course_and both they and their property would be taken by the Crown. I'm sure that never entered the Lord Treasurer's consideration. And, of course, as soon as the ink was dry on the confiscation orders, the Crown would then have itself a nice little "animal" auction. More money in the King's coffers, and it wouldn't even be slavery, which is wicked and really not civilized.
Nasty, insidious, and very popular in some quarters. Yes, it would "protect" the nonhumans from the demon hunters, for a little while_until Church canon was changed to make it possible for animals to be considered possessed!
Which it would be; after all, it's in the Holy Writ. There were the demons possessing a human that were cast out, and then possessed a herd of pigs and made the pigs drown themselves.
Small wonder that the Manufactory Guild was also behind this one, at least according to the rumors. If it was passed, the owners of manufactories could neatly bypass all the Church laws on labor by acquiring a nightshift of "animals" to run the machines without wages. There was no Church law saying animals couldn't work all night_nor any Church law giving them a rest day. If it passed_
Well, most of the nonhumans would flee before they could be caught, I suspect, but there are always those who can't believe that something like that would happen to them. There would probably be just enough of those poor naive souls and their children in Lyonarie to make up a workforce large enough to work the manufactories at night.
There would be a business in hunters, too, springing up in the wake of this law. Hunters? No, more like kidnappers. They would be going out and trying to entrap nonhumans in whichever of the other human kingdoms existed that did not pass this law, and bringing them back here to sell.