THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR.
[Sidenote: 1832--The slave trade]
The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had
taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so
great a triumph that most men assumed them to be capable of any
triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in
establishing one principle which, up to that time, had never been
recognized, the principle that a constitutional sovereign in these
countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will
in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of
William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the
sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining
his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of
English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even
coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own
conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a
stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to
listen to reason, and probably not even they knew at the time the full
importance of the constitutional principle which they had thus
established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really
constitutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem
to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant
of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people
according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of
statesmanship. When the passing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest
event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very
justly, regarded this assertion of the right of a representative
Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the
greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The
natural feeling therefore was to assume that the men who had done these
great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the
realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire
and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our
constitutional and our social system.
The time was one especially favorable for such hopes and for such
achievements. A new era had opened on the civilized world. New ideas
were coming up regarding the value and the validity of many of our
constitutional and social arrangements which had formerly been
considered as inspired and sanctified forever by that mysterious
influence, the wisdom of our ancestors. If education had not yet made
much way among the masses of the people, at least the belief in popular
education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all
intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new
reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an
organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons.
The first great work to which the reformed Parliament applied itself,
after the conditions of Lord Grey's Act had been allowed to take effect
in remoulding the constituencies, was the abolition of negro slavery in
the colonies of Great Britain. Domestic slavery and the slave trade
had already been abolished, but in the minds of a great number of
well-meaning, well-informed, and by no means hard-hearted men slavery
in our colonies was a very different sort of institution from slavery
in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary
Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions at all,
had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part
of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free constitution of
the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from
African sea-shores in order to sell them into slavery was an offence
against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did
not see that there was anything like the same {190} reason for
interfering with the system of slave labor as we had found it
established, for instance, in our West Indian colonies. "We did not
introduce the system there," it was argued; "we found it established
there; we inherited it; and its continuance is declared, by all those
who know, to be absolutely essential to the production of the sugar
which is the source of profit and the means of living to the islands
themselves, and an indispensable comfort, a harmless and healthful
luxury, to millions of civilized beings who never stood under a
tropical sky." The mind of the average Englishman, however, had been,
for some time, much disturbed by the arguments, the pleadings, and the
agitation of a small number of enlightened Reformers, at first much in
advance of their time, who were making a pertinacious crusade against
the whole system of colonial slavery. Some of these men have won names
which will always be honored in our history. Zachary Macaulay was one
of these. He was the father of the Macaulay whom we have just heard of
as seated side by side with Charles Greville at Lord Holland's
dinner-table. Zachary Macaulay had been the manager of a great West
Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience
would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery,
and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his
earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full
sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was
able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like
Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the
realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more
obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of
the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the
flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children
which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by
slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by men who
professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it
that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation
belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with
self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him
thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work,
and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have
a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his
own living property.
[Sidenote: 1832--The horrors of the slave trade]
Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads,
were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system
every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to
work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of
another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy
had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice
of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a
slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the
time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West
Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or
question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to
respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the
subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and
women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation,
and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of
punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common
practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have
her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving
her identity if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his
reach. Numbers of advertisements were produced in which the owners,
seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women
slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were
branded on both breasts, and that thus there could be no difficulty
about their identification. We need not go further into the details of
the subject, but it may be as well to mention that we have not touched
at all upon the most revolting evidences of the horrors which seemed to
{192} be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system. Brougham
was one of the first among leading Englishmen who threw his heart and
soul into the agitation against colonial slavery. Long before that
agitation approached to anything like success he had brought forward a
motion in the House of Commons, directing attention to the evils and
the horrors of the system, and calling for its abolition. For a time,
successive Governments did not see their way to go any further than to
endeavor to bring about or to enforce better regulations for the use of
slave labor on the colonial plantations. Even these modest measures of
reform had many difficulties to encounter. Some of the colonies were
under the direct dominion of the Crown, were governed, in fact, as
Crown colonies, but others had legislative chambers of their own, and
refused to submit to the dictation of the authorities at home. These
legislative chambers in most cases resented the interference of the
home Government when it attempted to introduce new rules for the
treatment of negro slaves, and the whole plantation interest rallied in
support of the great principle that every owner of slaves had an
absolute right to deal with them according to his own will and pleasure.
[Sidenote: 1832--Anti-slavery agitation]
It was loudly asserted by the planters and by the friends of the
planters--and of course the planters had friends everywhere in
England--that the sugar-growing business could not be carried on with
any profit except by means of slave labor, and that the slaves could
not be got to work except by the occasional use of flogging or other
such needful stimulant. The negroes, it was loudly declared, would
rise in rebellion if once it became known to them that the English
Parliament was encouraging them to consider themselves as slaves no
longer, and their mode of rising in rebellion would simply be a
simultaneous massacre of all the planters and their wives and children.
"See what you are doing!" many a voice cried out to the anti-slavery
agitators; "you are preaching a crusade which will not merely end in
the utter bankruptcy of the West Indian Islands, but in the massacre of
all the planters, their wives, and their children." The agitators,
however, were neither {193} dismayed nor disheartened. It would have
taken a good deal of sophistry to confuse the conscience of Zachary
Macaulay or Wilberforce. It would have taken a good deal of bellowing
to frighten Brougham. The agitation went on with increasing force, and
Brougham continued to denounce "the wild and guilty phantasy" that man
has property in man.
In Jamaica the colonial legislature, pressed hard by the Government at
home, passed an Act with the avowed purpose of mitigating the severity
of the punishments inflicted on slave laborers. The Act, however, was,
even on the face of it, absurdly inadequate for any humane purpose.
The home Government had demanded, among other reforms, the entire
discontinuance of the flogging of women. The colonial Act allowed the
flogging of women to go on just as it had done before. The Jamaica
planters were indignant at the course taken by the home authorities,
and raved as if they were on the verge of rebellion against the Crown,
and the well-meant interference of the Government at home seemed in
fact to have done more harm than good. In Demerara, which was the
Crown colony, some of the more intelligent among the negro slaves had
heard scraps of talk which led them to believe that the King of England
and his Government were about to confer freedom upon the colored race,
and these reports spread and magnified throughout certain plantations,
and the slaves on one estate refused to work. Their refusal was
regarded as an insurrection and was treated accordingly. The most
savage measures were employed to crush the so-called insurrection, just
as in more recent, and what ought to have been more enlightened, days
some local disturbances in Jamaica were magnified into a general rising
of the blacks against the whites, and the horrors perpetrated in the
name of repression startled the whole civilized world. In Demerara an
English dissenting missionary, the Rev. John Smith, who had been known
as a most kindly friend of the negroes, was formally charged with
having encouraged and assisted the slaves to rise in revolt against
their masters. He was flung into prison, was treated with barbarous
{194} rigors such as might have seemed in keeping with some story of
Siberia; he was put through the hurried process of a sham trial in
which the very forms of law were disregarded, and he was sentenced to
death. Even at Demerara and at such a time the court-martial which had
condemned the missionary as guilty of the offence with which he was
charged had accompanied its verdict with a recommendation to mercy on
account of the prisoner's previous good character. But before it could
be decided whether or not the recommendation was to have any effect,
the unfortunate man died of the treatment he had received.
[Sidenote: 1830--Parliamentary action against slavery]
The story of the accusation, the trial, and the death created an
immense sensation in England. Brougham, Buxton, Sir James Mackintosh,
the historian and scholar, and many others aroused the public
indignation by their rightful denunciations of the trial and the
verdict. The Government condemned and reversed the proceedings at the
trial, and when Brougham brought on a motion in the House of Commons,
publicly branding with just severity the whole conduct of the Demerara
authorities, his motion was only defeated by a small majority.
Meanwhile, the agitation against the whole system of colonial slavery
was receiving new impulse and new strength from the teaching of new
events in the colonies, and in May, 1830, a great meeting was held in
London to demand, not the mitigation, but the total abolition of
slavery in every land over which the flag of England floated. This
meeting was presided over by the great abolitionist, William
Wilberforce, who had been out of public life for some time owing to
severe ill-health, and who believed that he could not more fitly
celebrate his return to the active work of philanthropy than by taking
the chair at such a demonstration. Mr. Buxton proposed a resolution
calling on the country to agitate for the total abolition of slavery in
the colonies, and to be content with nothing else, and the resolution
was carried by enthusiastic acclamation. Brougham at once became the
champion of the great London meeting by a motion which he brought
forward in the House of Commons. One of the greatest speeches of his
lifetime {195} was made in justifying his appeal to the House for the
total abolition of a system which admitted of nothing like partial, or
what is called moderate, reform, and must either be swept out of
existence altogether or remain a curse to those who enforce it as well
as to those against whom it is enforced. Brougham's motion was
defeated, of course. We say of course because it was only a motion
made by an independent member, as the phrase goes, and was not proposed
by the leader of a strong Government, determined to stake its existence
on the carrying of its proposition. Every great reform, it may almost
literally be said, is heralded in Parliament by the motions of
independent members, who are sure to be defeated, but whose determined
efforts have success enough to make the leader of the Government, or
the leader of the Opposition, feel that the time is near at hand when
the cause must be taken up by one or other of the great parties in the
State.
Buxton raised the whole question in the following session; and then
Lord Althorp, speaking for the Government, went so far as to offer a
sort of compromise by suggesting that the colonies which in the future
should give evidence of their sincere resolve to make distinct
improvement in the condition of their slaves should be rewarded and
encouraged by a permission to send their sugar into English ports at a
reduced rate of duty. The country, however, had long outgrown the
condition of mind in which this feeble and ridiculous proposition could
be regarded as worthy of serious consideration. The notion of
sacrificing any part of the country's revenues for the purpose of
bribing the planters to deal a little less severely with their slaves
was not likely to find much favor among the men who had thus far
conducted the great agitation against slavery. The object of reformers
such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, and Mackintosh was not
merely that the negroes should be flogged less often, or that the negro
women should not be flogged at all, but that the whole abominable
system which made men, women, and children the absolute property of
their owners should be brought to an end forever.
{196}
[Sidenote: 1833--A plan for the abolition of slavery]
At last it became evident to the Whig Ministry that something definite
must be done, and that nothing would be considered definite by the
country which did not aim at the total abolition of slavery. The hour
had come, and the man who could best turn it to account in the House of
Commons was already in his place. Lord Stanley, who had joined the
Reform Ministry as Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had
since that time been moved to the higher position of Colonial
Secretary, and to him was appropriately confided the task of
introducing the measures which the Government had determined to take.
The Lord Stanley of those days was in after years the Earl of Derby,
whom some of us can still call to mind as one of the most brilliant
orators in the House of Lords at a time when Brougham and Lyndhurst
maintained the character of that assembly for parliamentary eloquence.
Those among us who remember the eloquent Lord Derby, the Rupert of
debate, remember him as a Tory Prime Minister or the Tory leader of
Opposition in the House of Lords. But he began his great Parliamentary
career as a Whig and as a Reformer, and he was one of the most zealous
of Lord Grey's colleagues in pressing forward the great measure which
was carried to success in 1832. Among those who can remember him there
is only one opinion about the high order of his Parliamentary
eloquence, and that opinion is that he was a worthy rival of Gladstone
and of Bright. To him as Colonial Secretary was entrusted the task of
bringing forward, in the House of Commons, the measures of the
Government for dealing with the question of slavery in the British
colonies. Stanley's speech was such a magnificent blending of reason
and emotion, so close and so powerful in its arguments, so thrilling in
its eloquence, that many of those who heard the speech naturally
expected that it was destined to announce a bold and a comprehensive
policy. A certain feeling of disappointment came up among the
abolitionists when the measures were described which the Government had
resolved to submit to the House of Commons. What Stanley had to
propose was not a complete measure, but a {197} series of resolutions
embodying the purposes of the Government's policy. It is enough to say
that the Government proposed a plan which amounted to a scheme of
abolition by stages. There was to be a certain period of
apprenticeship, a term of fifteen years, during which the slaves, men
and women, were to continue to work for their masters as before, under
conditions gradually relaxing as the slave drew nearer to the time of
emancipation, and then when that hour at length arrived the slave was
to be free forever. This principle, however, was not to apply to
children under six years old at the time of the passing of the measure,
or to any children born after that time. The idea on which the whole
scheme was founded was the notion, very common at that time and since,
that the sudden emancipation of any set of human beings could only tend
to bewilder them, and to prevent them from making a proper use of the
freedom thus abruptly thrust upon them. "The fool in the fable," said
Macaulay, when dealing with a somewhat similar question, "declared that
no man ought to go into the water until he had learned to swim." Lord
Grey's Ministry had apparently much the same idea about the perils of
emancipation. Another part of the scheme proposed that fifteen
millions should be advanced by the Government as a loan to the West
Indian planters in order to help them over the diminution of income
which might be expected to follow any interference with the conditions
of slave labor.
The resolutions put forward by the Government were regarded as highly
unsatisfactory by most of the leading abolitionists. Macaulay indeed
argued with all his usual eloquence and skill in favor of the principle
of gradual abolition, and it is hardly necessary to say that it was not
in that speech he made use of the pithy sentence which we have already
quoted. Buxton proposed an amendment to the resolution, an amendment
in fact calling for immediate abolition, and the amendment was seconded
by Daniel O'Connell. Buxton, however, was prevailed upon not to press
his amendment on the ground that the Government were as eager for
emancipation as any one could {198} be, and that Lord Grey and his
colleagues were only anxious to bring forward such a measure as might
at once secure the support of the majority and prevent further delay,
while securing, at the same time, the ultimate and not distant
settlement of the whole question. O'Connell stood firm, argued
strongly against the proposed compromise, refused to accept it, and
actually pressed Buxton's amendment to a division. Of course he was
defeated by a large majority, but he carried a respectable minority
along with him; and few now can doubt that the amendment which he
pressed forward, even after its proposer had abandoned it, was right in
its principle, and that the Government, if forced to it, could have
carried a plan for immediate abolition with little more difficulty than
was found in carrying the scheme of compromise. As the discussion went
on the Government made some further concessions to the abolitionists,
by reducing the time and modifying the terms of the apprenticeship
system, and the abolitionists in general believed it their wisest
policy to accept the modified arrangement and thus avoid any further
delay. Another alteration of great importance was made by the
Government in favor of the planters, and was finally accepted by the
abolitionists and by the country in general. The friends of the
planters made strong representations to the effect that the proffered
loan would be of no use whatever to the owners of slaves whose property
was so soon to pass from their hands into freedom, and that there was
not the slightest chance of the planters being able to pay back to the
English exchequer the amount that the Government was willing to
advance. It was urged, too, with some show of reason, that the
planters were not themselves responsible for the existence of slave
labor, that generations of planters had grown up under the system and
had made a profit by it during the days when civilization had not,
anywhere, set its face against slavery, and that it was hard,
therefore, to make them suffer in pocket for the recent development in
the feelings of humanity. The offer of a loan was abandoned by the
Government, and it was proposed instead that a gift of twenty millions
sterling should {199} be tendered as compensation for the losses that
the planters would be likely to undergo. This proposal, at first, met
with some opposition, and by many indeed was looked upon as an
extravagant freak of generosity; but some of the leading abolitionists
were willing to make allowance for the condition of the planters, and
most, or all, of them were prepared to make a large sacrifice for the
sake of carrying some measure which promised, even by gradual advances,
the final abolition of the slave system. We may condense into a very
brief space the remainder of the story, and merely record the fact that
the Government carried their amended measure of emancipation with its
liberal grant to the West Indian planters through both Houses of
Parliament, and that it obtained the royal assent.
[Sidenote: 1833--Slavery abolished in British colonies]
It may easily be imagined that poor King William must have had some
mental struggles before he found himself quite in a mood to grant that
assent. If the King ever had any clear and enduring opinion in his
mind, it probably was the opinion, which he had often expressed
already, against the abolition of slavery. He had, of course, a
general objection to reform of any kind, but his objection to any
reform which threatened the endurance of the slave system must have
been an article of faith with him. It was the fate of King William the
Fourth to live in a reign of reforms, not one of which would appear to
have touched his heart or been in accordance with his personal
judgment. The highest praise that history can give him is that he did
not at least, as one of his predecessors had done, set his own judgment
and his own inclination determinedly and irrevocably against the advice
of the statesmen whom he had called in to carry on the work of
administration. The King gave his assent to the amended Bill for the
abolition of slavery, including the generous gift to the planters, and
the measure became law on August 27, 1833. Some of the colonies had
the sense and spirit to discard the apprenticeship system altogether,
and to date the emancipation of their slaves from the day when the
measure became an Act of Parliament. In no colony did the setting free
of the negroes bring about any of the troubles and turmoils, the {200}
lawless outbreaks of blacks against whites, the massacres of the
innocents, which had been so long and so often pictured as the
inevitable consequences of the legislation demanded by the Clarksons,
the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and the Broughams. It seems to us all
now so much a matter of course for a civilized and enlightened State to
decree the extinction of slavery within its limits, that we find it
hard to appreciate at its true value the difficulty and the splendor of
the achievement which was accomplished by the Grey Ministry. It has to
be said, however, that the Ministry and the Parliament were, in this
instance, only the instruments by which the great charge was wrought.
The movement carried on out-of-doors, the movement set going by the
leading abolitionists and supported by the people, deserves the chief
honor of the victory. All the countries that make up the kingdom,
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, sent their authorized speakers
to sustain the cause of freedom for the slaves. The gift, which on the
recommendation of Lord Grey's Ministry was placed at the disposal of
the West Indian planters, was indeed a lavish gift; but the public in
general made little complaint on the score of its lavishness, and did
not calculate too jealously the value of the sacrifice which the State
was invited to make for the purchase of negro emancipation. Thirty
years and more had to pass before the great American republic was able
to free itself from the curse of slavery, and even then the late
deliverance was only accomplished at the cost of a war which threatened
for the season a permanent division of the States.
[Sidenote: 1833--Labor legislation]
The same year which saw the passing of the measure for the abolition of
slavery in the colonies saw also the passing of an Act which interfered
seriously, for the first time, with something which might almost be
called a system of domestic slavery. We are speaking now of the
measure which dealt with the conditions of factory labor in these
countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William
the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found
that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection
of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of ships, or
the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of
goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world.
Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and,
while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the
workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an
entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention
of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization
was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority,
there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which
civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely
expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between
capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory
naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in
manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was
found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the
course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was
opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of
labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very
best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they
employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to
interfere with them and those who worked for them, and that the civil
law could do only harm and no good by its best-intentioned interference.
The whole controversy has now been long settled, and it is a distinctly
understood condition of our social system that the State has a right to
interfere between employer and employed when the condition of things is
such that the employed is not always able to protect himself. At the
time when Lord Ashley started on his long and beneficent career there
was practically no law which regulated the hours and the conditions of
labor in the great factories. The whole factory system, the modern
factory system as we understand it, was then quite a new part of our
social organization. The factory, with its little army of workers,
{202} men, women, and children, was managed according to the will and
judgment of the owner, unless in the rare cases where the demand for
labor far exceeded the supply. In most places the supply exceeded the
demand, and the master was therefore free to make any conditions he
pleased with his workers. If the master were a humane man, a just man,
or even a far-seeing man, he took care that those who worked for him
should be fairly treated, and should not be compelled to work under
conditions dangerous to their health and destructive of their comfort.
But if he were a selfish man, or a careless man, the workers were used
merely as instruments of profit by him, or by those immediately under
him; and it did not matter how soon they were used up, for there could
always be found numbers enough who were eager to take their places, and
were willing to undertake any task on any terms, for the sake of
securing a bare living. Lord Ashley raised the whole question in the
House of Commons, and brought forward a motion which ended in the
appointment of a commission to inquire into the condition of the men,
women, and children who worked in the factories. The commission was
not long in collecting a vast amount of information as to the evils,
moral and physical, brought about by the overworking of women and
children in the factories. The general concurrence of public opinion,
even among those who supported Lord Ashley's movement, did not seem to
go beyond the protection of women and children. The adult male, it was
considered, might perhaps safely be left to make the best terms he
could for himself; but the inquiries of the commission left little
doubt among unprejudiced minds that something must be done to secure
women and children from the evils of overwork. Lord Ashley succeeded
in forcing the whole question on the attention of Parliament, and an
Act was passed in 1833 which did not indeed go nearly as far as Lord
Ashley would have carried his principle, but which at least established
the right of legislative interference for the protection of children
and young persons of both sexes. The Act limited the work of children
to eight hours a day and {203} that of young persons under eighteen to
sixty-nine hours a week. This Act may be regarded as the beginning of
that legislative interference which has gone on advancing beneficially
from that time down to our own, and is likely still to keep on its
forward movement.
[Sidenote: Lord Shaftesbury]
Lord Ashley, whom many of us can well remember as Lord Shaftesbury, may
be said to have given up the whole of his life to the general purpose
with which he began his public career--the object of endeavoring to
mitigate the toils and sufferings of those who have to work hard in
order to provide for others the comforts and the luxuries of life. His
principle was that the State has always a right to interfere for the
protection of those who cannot protect themselves. He was not a man of
great statesmanlike ability, he was not a man of extensive or varied
information, he was not a scholar, he was not an orator, he was not in
the ordinary sense of the word a thinker, but he was a man who had, by
a kind of philanthropic instinct, got hold of an idea which men of far
greater intellect had not, up to his time, shown themselves able to
grasp. The story of his life is part of the whole story of the
industrial development of modern civilization. Again and again he
worked with success in movement after movement, initiated mainly by
himself, for the protection and the education of those who toil in our
factories and in our mines. Some day no doubt Parliament may have to
devise legislation which shall do for the women and children employed
in field labor something like that which Lord Ashley did for the women
and children employed in factories and in mines. We have seen that
already efforts are made in every session of Parliament to extend the
principle of the factory legislation into various industrial
occupations which are common to city life. For the present, however,
we have only to deal with the fact that one of the first labors
accomplished by the Reformed Parliament was the establishment of that
legislative principle with which Lord Ashley's name will always be
associated.
Let it be added that, with the establishment of that principle, came
also the introduction of two innovations in our {204} factory system
which lent inestimable value to the whole measure. One of these was
the appointment of a number of factory inspectors, who were authorized
to see that the purposes of the Act were properly carried out by the
employers, and to report to the Government as to the working of the
whole system and the necessity for further improvements. The other was
the arrangement by which a portion of the time of all the younger
workers in the factories was set apart for educational purposes, so
that children should no longer be treated as mere machines for the
making of goods and the earning of wages, but should be enabled and
compelled to have their faculties developed by the instruction suited
to their years. This provision in the Factories Act may be regarded as
the first step towards that system of national education which it took
so much trouble and so many years to establish in these countries.
Lord Ashley had great work still to accomplish; but even if his noble
career had closed with the passing of the Factories Act in 1833, his
name would always be remembered as that of a man who, more than any
other, helped to turn the first Reformed Parliament to the work of
emancipating the English laboring classes in cities and towns from a
servitude hardly less in conflict with the best interests of humanity
than that which up to the same year had prevailed on the plantations of
Jamaica and Demerara. The Reformed Parliament had still much difficult
work to call out its best energies and to employ its new resources, but
it had begun its tasks well, and had already given the country good
earnest of its splendid future.
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