This House will hardly believe it, but I tell them, that this traffic in human flesh was as well kept up, they were in effect as regularly sold to these [Manchester] manufacturers as slaves are sold to the cotton-grower in the United States… In 1860, ‘the cotton trade was at its zenith.’ … The manufacturers again found that they were short of hands… They applied to the ‘flesh agents, as they are called. Those agents sent to the southern downs of England, to the pastures of Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in Wiltshire, but they sought in vain. The surplus-population was ‘absorbed.’”

I have often thought the conditions for workers and soldiers are just a bit too ridiculously overexaggerated and implausible. Then I remember that WWI and the Industrial Revolution actually happened.