For spinning mills, female workers and child laborers were most needed. Adult men, whose wages were far higher than either group's, were often "eliminated." Not all these unemployed men would sit around waiting to die; some entered workhouses or drifted about as vagrants, becoming the sort of factor Malthus's Essay on Population claimed had to be restrained because population growth caused panic over food supplies.
They would head to the New World in search of new work, or simply become sailors. After all, passage to the New World was not cheap. In short, they left Britain. And those British and Irish sailors working aboard foreign ships, especially American merchant vessels, would be seized by Royal Navy patrols and forced back into military service.
So did Britain lack people? It did, but it did not lack useless people. Even someone like John Flaxman, born with a spinal deformity, could marry and have children as long as he could design beautiful pottery. Men with sound limbs who turned to crime, on the other hand, were despised.
But people did not all share the same circumstances. Not everyone, like Flaxman, encountered a kind-hearted priest willing to adopt them. Many children wandering the streets eventually turned to crime, yet if they were sent to an orphanage, they would inevitably run away. Everyone knew that once inside, the parish overseers would send them to factories as child laborers, where the foremen could be brutally cruel.
If all one wanted was social stability and not morality, one only had to turn a blind eye to such things and could still sleep peacefully amid the shouting after nightfall.
But Britain's public security situation had become severe enough to affect stability, to the point that light cavalry had to be dispatched on patrol. Under the old Taixing System,