the hours of labour; but as the children were necessary adjuncts to the work of adults, this reform, to which the Government was forced, threatened the existence of the unlimited day of adults. The danger was averted by the official suggestion of the "relay system," by which gangs of children commenced work at different times of the fifteenhours day and succeeded one another so long as the machinery was at work. Theoretically this was unobjectionable, but in practice it made detection of infractions of the law impossible. The badly-drafted clauses about mealtimes added to the confusion, and before long the factory inspectors reported that the relay system defeated all administration of the Act. In fact, the old evils broke out again unchecked. Even had the Act been perfect, the number of inspectors was totally inadequate; and even had it been sufficient, the decision of factory cases by manufacturing justices would have nullified the law. As it was, the Act was reduced to a farce with the connivance of the Government, and the iniquity of entrusting human lives to the mercy of men moved by private gain and sheltering themselves under a cast-iron philosophy was once more proved. The Act is further remarkable for the creation of that most pathetic child-figure, the "half-timer." It was unimpeachable to the doctrinaire, and quite sound in theory, that a due combination of book-learning and practical instruction made the best education for a child; but when this theory involved the recognition of the factory as a suitable school for manual training, and the wild supposition that an eight-hour day of hard toil amid whirling machinery would leave in a nine-yearold child any capacity for the reception of instruction, the divorce between fact and fancy became manifest. Yet Sir Edwin Chadwick, to whom we owe the inception of the theory, remained to his death a convinced believer in it, and all the testimony of school teachers has not yet sufficed to secure its excision from the Statute-book. The insincerity of the Government was again shown by their omission to

make any provision for supplying the education which they made compulsory.

With the breakdown of the Act of 1833 came a renewal of the Ten Hours agitation, which rose to a white heat of anger when the Government in 1836 shamelessly proposed to repeal the clause limiting the labour of children between twelve and thirteen years of age. That attempt was defeated, and the movement underwent certain serious extensions. On the one hand, it got mixed up with the revolutionary economic proposals of the Chartists; and on the other, the Tory or country party used it as a weapon with which to combat the free-trade manufacturers. It thus acquired a greater Parliamentary strength; but the manufacturers, partly frightened at the danger of socialism, partly irritated at the insincerity of the landlord contingent, grew more and more incensed, and determined to prolong the struggle. As already said, the Ten Hours proposal involved more than the labour of children and young persons; it meant the restriction, though indirectly, of adult labour. The manufacturers called in the economist Nassau Senior to their assistance, and he proved that since no mill where young persons were employed could be worked more than eleven and a half hours a day on the average, the whole of the net profit of 10 per cent was produced in the last hour of the working day, and that "if the hours of working were reduced by one hour per day (prices remaining the same), the net profit would be destroyed; if they were reduced by one hour and a half, even the gross profit would be destroyed." This analysis was hailed as a triumphant refutation of the case for Ten Hours, and was long the chief weapon of the masters. In truth, it only exemplified the futility of a priori philosophy when belted on to factory gearing. Its validity was dependent on the truth of the assumption that the produce of each hour's labour was identical, whereas the longer the working day the less valuable was the product of

1 Letters on the Factory Act, 1837.

the last hour of exhausted operatives. For ten years Senior repelled the dreaded law; and when at last it was passed, manufacturers found that they had been fighting for a fallacy. Meanwhile, the reformers were unable to reply to the pseudo-scientific arguments of their opponents except with mere declamation, and this complete want of anything like a reasoned investigation of causes and effects made our factory legislation up to quite recent times a haphazard collection of imperfect and frequently contradictory regulations.

A letter written by Richard Cobden to the chairman of his committee, when he was parliamentary candidate for Stockport in 1836, sets forth the answer of the more enlightened of the factory party to the complaints of the workmen against the rule of competition : 1" 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 M'Culloch 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 policy 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. . . . I am aware that many of the advocates of the cause of the factory children are in favour of a Ten Hours Bill for restricting the working of the engines, which in fact would be to limit the use of steam in all cotton establishments (for young persons are, I believe, at present employed in every branch of our staple

1 Life of Richard Cobden, by John Morley, vol. i. pp. 464-68.

manufacture, more or less) to ten hours a day. It has always, however, appeared to me that those who are in favour of this policy lose sight of the very important consequences which are involved in the principle. Have they considered that it would be the first example of a legislature of a free country interfering with the freedom of adult labour? Have they reflected that if we surrender into the hands of Government the power to make laws to fix the hours of labour at all, it has as good a right, upon the same principle, to make twenty hours the standard as ten? Have they taken into account that if the spinners and weavers are to be protected by Act of Parliament, then the thousand other mechanical and laborious trades must in justice have their claims attended to by the same tribunal? I believe it is now nearly three hundred years ago since laws were last enforced which regulated or interfered with the labour of the working classes. They were the relics of the feudal ages, and to escape from the operation of such a species of legislation was considered as a transition from a state of slavery to that of freedom. Now it appears to me, however unconscious the advocates of such a policy may be of such consequences, that if we admit the right of the Government to settle the hours of labour, we are in principle going back to that point from which our ancestors escaped three centuries ago. Let not the people-I mean the massesthink lightly of those great principles upon which their strength wholly rests. . . . I would then advise the working classes to make themselves free of the labour market of the world, and this they can do by accumulating £20 each, which will give them the command of the only market in which labour is at a higher rate than in England-I mean that of the United States. If every working man would save this sum, he might be as independent of his employer as the latter, with his great capital, is of his workmen. Were this universal, we should hear no more of the tyranny of employers. . . . Mine is that masculine species of charity

which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of being patronised or petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise. I know it has been found easier to please the people by holding out flattering and delusive prospects of cheap benefits to be derived from Parliament, rather than by urging them to a course of self-reliance; but while I will not be the sycophant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor. How very obvious, however, must it be that any law restricting the hours of labour would be inoperative so soon as it became the interest of masters and workmen to violate it! Where, then, would be the utility or wisdom of an enactment which owed its power entirely to the free-will of the parties whom it professed to coerce? Surely they might act as effectually without the necessity of infringing and merely bringing into disrepute the law of the land!"

Essentially this is the case for individualism even as presented to-day. History never was a strong point with the Radicals, but it went to the verge of the permissible to confuse the objects of the Statute of Apprentices and the Ten Hours Bill: the former supported by the masters, intended to restrict the aggression of the labourers, and fixing a minimum working day; the latter demanded by the workmen for their protection against their employers, and establishing a maximum working day. Nevertheless, much may be pardoned Cobden on account of his enlightened views on child labour, which are not out of date even to-day. The calmness with which he, a manufacturer, contemplated the emigration of his best hands would be astounding were it not probable that he expected it would never take place. Free traders held that the adoption of their policy would benefit the workers by cheap food, and thereby enable the employers to reduce wages; at the same time, free imports would cause such a boom in trade that the unemployed would be absorbed, and the operatives would be strong