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Tory Philanthropy and the Factory Movement - Albert Venn Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (LF ed.) [1917]

Edition used:

Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, edited and with an Introduction by Richard VandeWetering (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Tory Philanthropy and the Factory Movement

The age of individualism was emphatically the era of humanitarianism—it was the philanthropy of the day which, in the midst of the agitation for parliamentary reform, would not suffer the wrongs of the negroes to be forgotten. Now at the very time when the country was moved to passionate indignation at the horrors of West Indian slavery, public attention was suddenly directed, by the publication of Richard Oastler’s Slavery in Yorkshire, to oppression, not in the West Indies, but in Yorkshire—to the bondage, not of negroes, but of English children. The horrors denounced by Oastler were of precisely the kind which most outraged the humanitarianism of the day. His appeal to the English public went home; it was the true beginning of the factory movement.11

That movement was in truth the fruit of humanitarianism.

The earliest Factory Act belongs to an age (1802) when English statesmen had hardly heard of socialism. The strength of Oastler’s appeal was public indignation at the physical sufferings brought, as it was believed, by the greed of manufacturers upon helpless infants. That English children were held in bondage, that to perform their task-work they were compelled under cruel punishment to walk as much as twenty miles a day, that their day’s work lasted for from twelve to sixteen hours, were the facts or allegations which aroused the pity and the wrath of the nation. The vehemence of popular indignation had in its origin nothing to do with socialistic theories. The factory movement was in full accordance with the traditional principle of the common law that all persons below twenty-one had a claim to special protection. Nor was there anything in the early factory movement which was opposed either to Benthamism or to the doctrines of the most rigid political economy. Individualists of every school were only too keenly alive to the danger that the sinister interest of a class should work evil to the weak and helpless. They almost identified power with despotism. In 1836 Cobden was not only willing, but ready to exclude absolutely from labour in a cotton mill any child below the age of thirteen.

As respects the right and justice by which young persons ought to be protected from excessive labour, my mind has ever been decided, and I will not argue the matter for a moment with political economy; it is a question for the medical and not the economical profession; I will appeal to —— or Astley Cooper, and not to McCulloch or Martineau. Nor does it require the aid of science to inform us that the tender germ of childhood is unfitted for that period of labour which even persons of mature age shrink from as excessive. In my opinion, and I hope to see the day when such a feeling is universal, no child ought to be put to work in a cotton-mill at all so early as the age of thirteen years; and after that the hours should be moderate, and the labour light, until such time as the human frame is rendered by nature capable of enduring the fatigues of adult labour. With such feelings as these strongly pervading my mind, I need not perhaps add that, had I been in the House of Commons during the last session of Parliament, I should have opposed with all my might Mr. Poulett Thomson’s measure for postponing the operation of the clause for restricting the hours of infant labour.12

Nor need Cobden have hesitated to appeal to McCulloch. This economist had already in 1833 thus expressed his sympathy with Lord Ashley’s13 philanthropic efforts:

I hope your Factory Bill will prosper, and I am glad it is in such good hands. Had I a seat in the House it should assuredly have my vote. A notion is entertained that political economists are, in all cases, enemies to all sorts of interference, but I assure you I am not one of those who entertain such an opinion. I would not interfere between adults and masters; but it is absurd to contend that children have the power to judge for themselves as to such a matter. I look upon the facts disclosed in the late Report as most disgraceful to the nation; and I confess that, until I read it, I could not have conceived it possible that such enormities were committed. Perhaps you have seen the late work of M. Cousin, who was sent by the French Government to report on the state of education in Germany. It is well worth your Lordship’s attention. In Prussia, and most other German States, all persons are obliged to send their children to school from the age of seven to thirteen or fourteen years, and the education given to them is excellent; as much superior to anything to be had in this country as it is possible to conceive. This is the sort of interference that we ought gradually to adopt. If your Bill has any defect, it is not by the too great limitation, but by the too great extension of the hours of labour.14

Macaulay was at no time of his life fascinated by the ideals or tolerant of the weaknesses of socialism, yet under the influence of humanitarianism, as of common sense, he made by far the best defence delivered in Parliament15 of the Ten Hours Bill. Southey, anticipator though he was of socialistic ideas, denounced the employment of children in factories on the simple ground of humanity.

“There is one thing,” he writes to Lord Ashley,

connected with these accursed factories which I have long intended to expose, and that is, the way in which Sunday Schools have been subservient to the merciless love of gain. The manufacturers know that a cry would be raised against them if their little white slaves received no instruction; and so they have converted Sunday into a school-day, with what effect may be seen in the evidences!

Thousands of thousands will bless you for taking up the cause of these poor children. I do not believe that anything more inhuman than the system has ever disgraced human nature in any age or country. Was I not right in saying that Moloch is a more merciful friend16 than Mammon? Death in the brazen arms of the Carthaginian idol was mercy to the slow waste of life in the factories.17

Humanitarianism, then, was the parent, if socialism was the offspring, of the factory movement, and that movement from the first came under the guidance of Tories.

With this movement will be for ever identified the names of Southey, Oastler, Sadler, and above all of Lord Shaftesbury.

The character and the career of these leaders is the best illustration of the intimate connection between the attack on the iniquities of the factory system and toryism.

Southey (1774–1843) was in 1830 a Tory of the Tories. His whole career is paradoxical. He had once been a Jacobin, he had never been a Whig. He understood revolutionary enthusiasm; he had no desire for moderate reform or appreciation of its benefits. The foundation of his political creed was belief in the advantages to be derived from the free employment of the influence of the Church and the resources of the State for the benefit of the poor. This creed made it easy for the philanthropic Jacobin of 1794 to develop into the humanitarian Tory of 1830. It was natural for Whigs to see in Southey a weather-cock which, having turned rusty, had set up for a sign-post; it was equally natural that in Southey’s own mind the essential identity of his sentiment in youth and in old age should conceal from him the apparent transformation of his political principles. His fame in his own day rested on his position as a man of letters. Even his friends could not have thought him a powerful reasoner; they must have expected that though his writings might be long remembered for their literary merits, he would never exert any memorable influence as a social reformer. But it is now manifest that while Southey’s literary reputation has declined, his ideas on social questions exerted a permanent influence. He was a Carlyle without Carlyle’s rhetorical genius and rough humour, but also without Carlyle’s cynical contempt for humanitarianism. He was essentially a philanthropist. He is to us the prophetic precursor of modern collectivism. To his own generation he was the preacher of Tory philanthropy. The text on which he preached with the utmost vehemence was the duty of abolishing the cruelties of factory life.

Oastler (1789–1861) was a demagogue, but he was also a Churchman, a Tory, and a Protectionist. He hated the new poor law partly for the hardship it inflicted upon the poor, partly because he foresaw it would lead to the repeal of the corn laws, and believed that it would be fatal to the influence of the Church and of the landowners. A certain unity is given to the demagogic career of this “Factory king” by his denunciation of the whole system of factory labour. To him is due both the enthusiasm which ultimately carried the Ten Hours Bill and the gross exaggeration which identified the sufferings of children in English factories with the abominations of West Indian slavery, and thus excited the legitimate indignation even of manufacturers who were also philanthropists.

Michael Sadler (1780–1835) was born a member of the Church of England. Brought up in Tory principles, he remained throughout life a fervent Tory. He opposed Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary reform. In 1823 the wrong done to children in factories enlisted his keenest sympathy. He was already interested in economical and social questions, and became not only the leader, but the theorist of the factory movement. As a sort of Christian and Tory socialist he attacked, though without any true grasp of political economy, the individualism which underlay the teaching of economists such as Ricardo. He thus introduced into the factory movement ideas which pointed towards socialism.

Sadler’s public career represents dramatically the collision between Whig liberalism and Tory philanthropy. Twice he came into conflict with Macaulay, and twice he suffered defeat. In 1830 Sadler’s ignorant and illogical attacks on Malthusianism involved him in a literary duel with the eloquent Whig reviewer. Party spirit ran high. Sadler’s reasoning was full of flaws, and he suffered a disastrous argumentative overthrow; his critic did not care to consider whether inaccurately stated dogmas might not contain some element of neglected truth. In 1832 Sadler, who had sat in Parliament for a rotten borough abolished by the Reform Act, was a candidate for the representation of the newly created constituency of Leeds. His opponent was again Macaulay, and their second encounter ended in Sadler’s defeat. This conclusion of the conflict was appropriate; it was fitting that the brilliant representative of liberalism should share the general triumph of individualism. It was also fitting that the representative of expiring toryism and as yet unrecognised collectivism, should suffer a repulse. That the humanitarian Whig and the Tory philanthropist, who were really at one on the necessity of protecting overworked children from ill usage, should in 1832 have understood one another was an impossibility. At the bottom of the literary and of the political battle lay the difference which divides liberalism from socialism.

Sadler’s electoral defeat had one result of immense importance. It passed the leadership of the factory movement, then summed up in the demand for the Ten Hours Bill, into the hands of its most famous leader.

Lord Shaftesbury was the ideal Tory humanitarian.

To him we may apply Cowper’s well-known line which eulogises or satirises a peer who lent dignity to the early evangelical revival as—

One who wears a coronet, and prays.

In spirit Lord Shaftesbury always “wore a coronet”; he was, in the words of an American observer, the “complete beau-ideal of aristocracy.” He inherited, together with the virtues, at least one of the faults often belonging to high lineage, he lacked all play of intellect or of fancy; he possessed neither subtlety nor versatility. At the foundation of his character lay moral and intellectual rigidity. Though an Oxford First Class man, he was in no way affected by the training which left indelible traces upon the minds, one might say upon the very natures of Cardinal Newman, Dr. Arnold, and Gladstone. If Lord Shaftesbury’s collegiate career were at some future time to be inferred from his tastes and from his opinions, the obvious surmise of an historical inquirer would be that his Lordship graduated at Cambridge and never missed a sermon of Simeon’s. In his purely political opinions he was all of a piece; he exhibits the stiffness of a Tory as rigid and thorough-going as could be a man of much sound sense and of a very sensitive conscience. He opposed Catholic Emancipation, and voted at last for the Catholic Relief Bill only when Peel’s surrender made the concession of political rights to Roman Catholics a necessity. He came into Parliament as a protectionist, and when he saw that protection must be given up, resigned a seat which he had gained as an opponent of free trade. During his later life he placed much confidence in Palmerston, but when that most aristocratic of Liberal Premiers perceived what Bagehot has termed “the inestimable and unprecedented opportunity” of reforming the House of Lords without agitation, Lord Shaftesbury pronounced the proposal to create life peers to be as pernicious as it was specious, and foreboded that it would end in making the House of Lords like the American Senate. Ignorance, very characteristic of an English nobleman, was in this instance—not at all a solitary one—as remarkable as prejudice; for in 1857 to have given the House of Lords the position then held by the American Senate would have made the peers the most powerful body in the State. Lord Shaftesbury opposed throughout his career everything which he deemed a concession to Papal claims or to the High Church movement. But if he was an ardent Protestant, he was in theological matters intolerant of free thought18 and of free discussion. Opposition to the results of Biblical criticism led him indeed into a curious alliance with Pusey.

Lord Shaftesbury, however, was primarily neither a politician nor a theologian, but a religious humanitarian. As he believed, and, as his critics, to whatever school they belong, may well believe also, it was implicit faith in a definite religious creed which compelled him to devote his life to philanthropic labours. One singularity at any rate of his career, and a singularity which for the purpose of these lectures proves to be of great importance, is that his defects no less than his virtues contributed to the success, and still more to the wide-reaching results of his work. Lord Shaftesbury formed no social theories. He never consciously advocated any measures which in his eyes savoured of socialism, a creed which he seemingly connected with infidelity.19 At the same time he did not understand, as did Macaulay, the grounds on which factory legislation might be defended by men who distrusted all socialistic experiments. From Southey he had imbibed that opposition to laissez faire which is characteristic of every collectivist, and which falls in with the natural desire of an ardent philanthropist to save from immediate suffering any class of persons who are unable completely to protect themselves against oppression, and to do this by the means which lie nearest to hand, without deeply considering whether action which gives immediate relief to sufferers, e.g. women overworked in factories, may not possibly in the end produce evils of untold magnitude. Lord Shaftesbury, in short, was in practice, though not in theory, the apostle of governmental interference, and this, in part at least, because his intellectual limitations prevented him from realising the difficulty of reconciling paternal government with respect for individual freedom. Here we see how his very deficiencies increased his influence. They gained for him the support of two classes who do not in England often act together. The artisans were glad to follow a leader who shared their faith in the benefits to be derived from extending the authority of the State, and who with them felt no love whatever, to use the mildest terms, for manufacturers or mill-owners. If his latent and unconscious socialism conciliated working men, his position and his defects enlisted for him the support of members of the middle-class who would never have followed a demagogue or a democrat. He was born heir to an English peerage—he became an English peer; he was a rigid Tory—he was not a theorist; he was a Low Churchman, he was the friend of Dissenters; he detested Roman Catholicism, Republicanism, socialism, and infidelity. How could any good and benevolent man belonging to the middle class fail in the middle of the nineteenth century to feel that his lordship was the safest of guides? Here and there a cold-blooded critic might note that the principles on which Lord Shaftesbury unconsciously acted were of wider application than the philanthropist perceived. A story is told, which may possibly be true, that Lord Melbourne introduced Lord Ashley—as he then was—to the young Queen as “the greatest Jacobin in your Majesty’s dominions.” The tale, if true, illustrates the keen insight of the easygoing Whig premier. But not one among Lord Shaftesbury’s middle-class followers would have seen the true point of the joke. “No one goes so far as the man who doesn’t know where he is going.” This dictum, attributed to Cromwell, holds good both of men and of parties. The chief of the Tory philanthropists and his followers were not revolutionists, but they entered on a path which might well lead towards social revolution, and of which, apparently, they perceived neither the direction nor the goal. However this may be, the factory movement came from the first under the patronage and the guidance of Tories.

The factory movement gave rise to a parliamentary conflict between individualism and collectivism.

With the details of the agitation for the Ten Hours Bill which was not brought to a final close till 1850, with the various Acts passed in the course thereof, and with the ups and downs of the conflict between the opponents and the advocates of the Bill, we are not here concerned. The point here to be insisted upon is that the demand for the Ten Hours Act gave rise to a bitter conflict of which, owing to the circumstances of the day, the true character was concealed from the combatants. Everything was complicated by the accident that the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws covered nearly the same years as the early factory movement; repeal was obtained but one year before the Ten Hours Bill passed into law. In both contests Tories and protectionists were ranged against Radicals and free traders. As regards free trade the Tories played the unpopular part; they opposed the will of the people, and were liable to the charge (often grossly unjust) of starving the poor in order to raise the rents of landowners. The free traders meanwhile stood forward as friends of the people. Nor were the free trade orators in their attacks on protectionists careful to distinguish between economical heterodoxy and moral selfishness. In the battle over the Factory Bill the parts were reversed. Reasoners who insisted upon the indirect evils of State intervention were deemed heartless logicians smitten with a fatuous faith in the dismal science, and mill-owners, believed to wring huge profits out of the toil of overworked children, were placed on a level with slave-owners who refused to put an end to the tyranny from which they drew no small gain. Nor in popular estimation did the radicalism of the cotton lords do them any good. They looked like politicians who, after posing as the assertors of the rights of the people, had first by the new poor law deprived labourers of much-needed relief, and then in the name of laissez faire were claiming the right to overwork the children of artisans; the liberalism of such men might seem to add to cruelty a touch of hypocrisy. The Tory philanthropists, on the other hand, gained popularity, and even ordinary Tories stood forth in a more or less favourable light. They were honest gentlemen who had no liking for the new poor law, and who felt for the pangs of children and women held in bondage by greedy mill-owners. Who can wonder that Tories enjoyed the new sense of popularity, or that their leaders were not blind to the advantages of the situation? Disraeli, no doubt, honestly detested cruelties perpetrated in factories; but the author of Sybil knew well that his novel was a splendid party pamphlet fitted to show that the Tories were the true friends of the working-classes. On both sides there was nothing but misunderstanding and recrimination. If in the eyes of the Tory philanthropists their opponents seemed to be oppressors deficient in the ordinary feelings of humanity, to mill-owners and economists the promoters of the Ten Hours Bill were protectionists, who, under the cloak of philanthropy, tried to revive for their own advantage delusions exposed by the Anti-corn Law League, and who patronised socialism in order to revenge the overthrow of protection; their benevolence was at best stupidity, and at the worst hypocrisy supported by calumny.20

If any one deems this description of animosities which have passed away an exaggeration, let him compare the sort of anathema pronounced by Lord Shaftesbury on the men who came not to his aid in the war against oppression with Bright’s denunciation of the cant which, as he believed, had carried, and of the injustice which had been wrought by, the Ten Hours Act.

“I had,” wrote Lord Shaftesbury in his private diary,

to break every political connection, to encounter a most formidable array of capitalists, mill-owners, doctrinaires, and men who, by natural impulse, hate all “humanity-mongers.” They easily influence the ignorant, the timid, and the indifferent; and my strength lay at first . . . among the Radicals, the Irishmen, and a few sincere Whigs and Conservatives. Peel was hostile, though, in his cunning, he concealed the full extent of his hostility until he took the reins of office, and then he opposed me, not with decision only, but malevolence, threatening, he and Graham, to break up his administration, and “retire into private life” unless the House of Commons rescinded the vote it had given in favour of my Ten Hours Bill. The Tory country gentlemen reversed their votes; but, in 1847, indignant with Peel on the ground of corn law repeal, they returned to the cause of the factory children. . . .

In very few instances did any mill-owner appear on the platform with me; in still fewer the ministers of any religious denomination. . . .

O’Connell was a sneering and bitter opponent. Gladstone ever voted in resistance to my efforts; and Brougham played the doctrinaire in the House of Lords.

Bright was ever my most malignant opponent. Cobden, though bitterly hostile, was better than Bright. He abstained from opposition on the Collieries Bill, and gave positive support on the Calico Print-works Bill.

Gladstone21 is on a level with the rest; he gave no support to the Ten Hours Bill; he voted with Sir R. Peel to rescind the famous division in favour of it. He was the only member who endeavoured to delay the Bill which delivered women and children from mines and pits; and never did he say a word on behalf of the factory children, until, when defending slavery in the West Indies, he taunted Buxton with indifference to the slavery in England!

Lord Brougham was among my most heated opponents. He spoke strongly against the Bill in 1847.

Miss Martineau also gave her voice and strength in resistance to the measure.22

“Why are we mill-owners,” was Bright’s retort,

to be selected as subjects of interference? Why is a Scotchman to be sent to see how I work my people, while the farmer, and the carpenter, and the builder, and the tailor is left to the ordinary responsibilities of law and public opinion? Are we worse educated than they are? Are our people less intelligent, more ready to submit to oppression, or more easy to manage? It was proposed the other day to force us to spend millions in boxing off our machinery. We have in our mills about a thousand work-people. In fifteen years we have had five accidents. We have three carters. In the same space of time two of them have been killed. I have no doubt that in agricultural employments accidents are a hundred times more frequent in proportion to the numbers employed, than those which occur in factories. But we are unpopular, we are envied, we are supposed to be rich, we are Radicals, and Whigs and Tories combine to gain popularity by calumniating us and robbing us. I have advised my partners, if this machinery Bill passes, to set the example of turning the key on the doors of our mills, and to throw on the legislators the responsibility of feeding the millions whom they will not allow us to employ with a profit.23

Such was the language used by men, each of whom was a Christian and a gentleman, each of whom was a staunch friend of the people, and each of whom was incapable of conscious slander or malignity; it was used, be it noted, not in the heat of conflict, but after the fight for the Ten Hours Bill had been won and lost.

All this invective was unjust. Bright was not a Legree; Peel was not a Bounderby, nor Gladstone a Gradgrind; Lord Shaftesbury was no political Pecksniff. The leading opponents, no less than the leading supporters of the factory movement, were men of high public spirit and undoubted humanity. What is the explanation of their antagonism? Lord Shaftesbury’s list of opponents supplies the answer. They were all of them individualists, whilst the Tory philanthropists were, though they knew it not, the leaders of a reaction; the factory movement was the battle-field of collectivism against individualism, and on that field Benthamite liberalism suffered its earliest and severest defeat. The bitterness of the conflict was probably increased by the consciousness of both of the parties to it that their own case had in it an element of weakness. Experience has proved that neither party was entirely in the right. The Ten Hours Act has not ruined British industry, and has put an end to much suffering. So far the policy of Lord Shaftesbury has been justified, and the resistance of the manufacturers has been condemned by experience. But the Ten Hours Act has tended towards socialism, and contains within it the germs of an unlimited revolution, of which no man can as yet weigh with confidence the benefits against the evils; and this revolution was one which Lord Shaftesbury did not intend to favour, and to the possibility whereof he was absolutely blind. Bright and his associates were far more keen sighted than the Tory philanthropists.

The factory movement introduced socialistic enactments into the law of England and gave prestige and authority to the ideas of collectivism.

The existing labour code,24 which consolidates a whole line of Factory Acts, is the most notable achievement of English socialism.25 The assertion, therefore, that the factory movement of which these Acts were the outcome, fostered the growth of socialism and gave authority to the ideas of collectivism, appears at first sight to involve the absurdity of putting the cart before the horse, and of treating legislation, which resulted from a particular state of opinion, as the cause of the state of opinion whence it sprung. But to a student who has grasped the true relation between law and opinion,26 this apparent absurdity becomes an obvious truism. To him the history of the factory movement is of itself sufficient proof that laws may be the creators of legislative opinion.

The effect, indeed, of the factory legislation embodied in the Ten Hours Act27 and the enactments which led up to it, may appear at first sight to be nothing more than the protection from overwork of children, young persons, and women28 employed in a limited number of manufactories. But this legislation had in reality far wider results. It recognised the principle that the regulation of public labour is the concern of the State and laid the basis for a whole system of governmental inspection and control. It fixed the hours of labour in the factories to which it applied for every woman,29 whatever her age, and conferred upon her a protection, as well as imposed upon her a disability which is absolutely unknown to the common law of England, and is directly opposed to the fundamental assumptions of individualism. This factory legislation fixed, though not in so many words nor in all cases immediately, the normal day of work for all persons of whatever age or sex employed in the factories to which it extended. It applied, indeed, in the first instance only to a limited number of factories; but it contained principles of the widest scope, which were applicable and which were certain to be ultimately applied in the most general way to every kind of labour of which the public can take cognizance. It assuredly, therefore, has introduced socialistic enactments into the English labour law. But the factory legislation of 1848–50 did at once, or very nearly at once, far more than this. At the time when the repeal of the corn laws gave in the sphere of commerce what seemed to be a crowning victory to individualism, and when the prosperity following on free trade stimulated to the utmost in almost every department of life the faith in and the practice of laissez faire, the success of the Factory Acts gave authority, not only in the world of labour, but in many other spheres of life, to beliefs which, if not exactly socialistic, yet certainly tended towards socialism or collectivism.

[11. ]Factory legislation dates from 1802, but the factory movement aroused by Oastler’s letters dates from 1830.

[12. ]Morley, Life of Cobden, i. pp. 464, 465, Appendix. It is to be regretted that Cobden’s idea did not bear fruit. There might have been some advantage in trying the experiment whether the complete protection of children might not have been found compatible with the minimum of interference with the management of factories.

[13. ]Afterwards known to the present generation as Lord Shaftesbury, and for the sake of convenience generally so described in these Lectures.

[14. ]Hodder, Life of Shaftesbury, i. pp. 157, 158. McCulloch to Lord Ashley, 28th March 1833.

[15. ]For speech on Ten Hours Bill, 22nd May 1846, see Macaulay, Speeches (ed. 1871), p. 718.

[16. ]Lege “fiend”?

[17. ]Hodder, i. pp. 156, 157. Southey to Lord Ashley, 7th Feb. 1833. Coleridge was one of those who (1802) took an interest in the factory children. He writes to a lawyer to know “‘if there is not some law prohibiting, or limiting, or regulating the employment either of children or adults, or both, in the white lead manufactory? . . . Can your [sic] furnish us with any other instances in which the Legislature has directly, or by immediate consequence, interfered with what is ironically called “Free Labour”? (i.e.dared to prohibit soul murder and infanticide on the part of the rich, and self-slaughter on that of the poor!)’ The letter also alludes to circulars drawn up by S.T.C. in favour of Sir Robert Peel’s Bill. It would be interesting to know if any of these circulars are in existence.”—Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, p. 29 (n.).

[18. ]He was strongly opposed to the revision of the authorised version of the Bible.—Hodder, Shaftesbury, iii. p. 258.

[19. ]He writes to a socialistic ally: “You have been represented to me as a socialist and an advocate of principles that I regard with terror and abhorrence; and you will therefore readily believe the pleasure with which I observed the spirit and language of your letter. I could not but apply to you the words of that Book whose expressions you have borrowed, and say, as was said to Ananias of Saul, ‘Behold, he prayeth.’ I deeply rejoice in this, because I respect your talents, I admire your zeal, and I hope to find in you a true and faithful ally in these great and final efforts for the moral, social, and religious welfare of the working people.”—Hodder, Life of Lord Shaftesbury, vol. i. pp. 407, 408. Conf. pp. 322, 323.

[20. ]Compare, for Peel’s attitude with regard to the factory movement, Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, iii. p. 486.

[21. ]Note that in 1864 Gladstone more or less came round to the policy of the Factory Acts. Hodder, Shaftesbury, ii. p. 206.

[22. ]Hodder, Shaftesbury, ii. pp. 209, 210.

[23. ]Simpson, Many Memories of Many People, pp. 263, 264. Bright’s words were apparently spoken Sept. 15, 1855.

[24. ]Embodied in the Factory and Workshop Act, 1901.

[25. ]Written in 1905.

[26. ]See p. 30, ante.

[27. ]The Act must be taken together with the enactments leading up to it. There appears to be some little confusion in the use of the term the Ten Hours Act. The statute most properly known by that name is 10 & 11 Vict. c. 29, passed in 1847 and coming into full force in 1848. But this statute was liable to evasion, and was rendered effective by an Act (13 & 14 Vict. c. 54) which received the Royal assent on July 26, 1850. This later Act seems to be sometimes treated as the Ten Hours Act. The general effect of the law on the passing of this Act has been thus stated in popular language:

“It reduced the legal working day for all young persons and women, to the time between six in the morning and six in the evening, with one and a half hours for meals. This permitted ten and a half hours’ work on five days in the week; on Saturdays no protected person was to work after two. Such was the main feature of 13 & 14 Vict. c. 54, which has, since 1850, regulated the normal day in English factories.”—Hodder, Life of Lord Shaftesbury, ii. p. 202. It will be observed that it made the time of labour on Saturdays less than ten hours, and on the five other working days of the week not ten hours, but ten hours and a half.

[28. ]The definition of the ages of these protected persons has varied under different Acts. Under the present law “child” means any person under the age of thirteen, or in some cases under fourteen; “young person” means any person (not being a child) under eighteen; “woman” means any woman of the age of eighteen and upwards. See Factory and Workshop Act, 1901, s. 156.

[29. ]The Factory Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 15), sec. 32.