V.

Manchester, and had caused the death of many Lecture apprentices employed in the cotton mills. The plague was attributed to their scanty diet, and to the wretched conditions under which the apprentices, mostly pauper children, sent up to the north of England by the parochial authorities of the south, worked out their time of bondage. The Act of 1802 regulated, to a limited extent, the employment of these apprentices in cotton and woollen factories. It contained a few sanitary and moral rules; as, for example, that the rooms of any factory within the Act should be washed twice a year with quicklime and water; that each apprentice should receive two suits of clothes; that no apprentice should be kept at work more than twelve hours a day; that the apartments of male and female apprentices should be kept distinct; that not more than two should sleep in one bed; that every apprentice should on Sunday for the space of one hour "be instructed and examined in the principles of the Christian religion by a qualified person."

This law, which deserves special attention on account of its connection with the factory legislation of a later time,' is in complete correspondence with the ideas of an era when reform of all kinds was checked by dread of innovation, and humanitarianism could best obtain a hearing when allied with the promotion of sound churchmanship. A reader versed in the religious literature of 1800 might well believe that Sir Robert Peel had drafted the Health and Morals Act after consultation with Hannah More. This earliest Factory Act was the

1 See Lect. VII. post.

V.

Lecture work of benevolent Tories; it sprung from the needs of the moment, and owed nothing either to the advance of democracy or to socialism. The means provided for its enforcement (e.g. the inspection of the mills, which come within its scope, by visitors' who owed their appointment to justices of the peace) were ridiculously inadequate. The Act was a moral protest against cruelty, but practically produced no effect. These remarks apply more or less to enactments of a similar character which followed the Health and Morals Act, 1802, and were passed in 1819,2 in 1825, in 1829, and, to a great extent, even to the more effective Act of 1831.5

(D) Close of the Period of Quiescence

From 1815 to 1820, or even to 1825, Toryism was supreme in State and Church, reform was identified with revolution, and legislative reaction, in the judgment of Whigs and Radicals, menaced the hereditary liberties of Englishmen. In 1830 legislative inertia came with apparent suddenness to an end. The activity of Parliament, which has lasted, though, with varying force, till the present day, evinced for a short time a feverish energy which alarmed tried reformers. "All gradation and caution," murmured Sydney Smith, "have been banished since the "Reform Bill-rapid high-pressure wisdom is the only agent in public affairs."7

1 42 Geo. III. c. 73.

3 6 Geo. IV. c. 63.

2 39 Geo. III. c. 66.
4 10 Geo. IV.
c. 51.

5 1 & 2 Will. IV. c. 39. This last Act was of a wider scope and

comes within the period of individualism.

6 See pp. 30-32, ante.

7 Sydney Smith, Works (ed. 1879), p. 340 (n.).

Whence this sudden outburst of legislative Lecture activity?

The answer may be given in one sentence: The English people had at last come to perceive the intolerable incongruity between a rapidly changing social condition and the practical unchangeableness of the law.

This general reply itself needs explanation. We must examine a little further what were the slowly operating causes of a noteworthy revolution in opinion. Our task will be lightened if we bear in mind that men's beliefs are in the main the result of circumstances1 rather than of arguments, and that a policy, or rather the public opinion from which it derives its authority, is often in the greatest danger of overthrow at the moment of its apparent triumph.2

The conditions which terminated the era of legislative quiescence, or (what is the same thing looked at from another point of view), which promoted the growth of Benthamite liberalism, may be conveniently brought under four heads: First, the rapid change in the social condition of England between 1800 and 1830; secondly, the increasing unsuitability of unchanging institutions for a quickly developing society; thirdly, the lapse of time, which of itself obliterated the memories of the French Revolution; fourthly, the existence of the Benthamite school.

(1) As to the Change in the Social Condition of England. It is somewhat difficult for a student to realise the indisputable fact that a period of legal stagnation was in other respects a period of great moral and intellectual activity. The termination,

1 See pp. 26, 27, ante.

2 See p. 21, ante.

V.

Lecture indeed, of the great war opened a season of popular V. distress, which, however, slowly passed, as the century went on, into a time of mercantile and manufactur

ing prosperity.

It was an era of social change.

In

Population was constantly on the increase.
1801 the population of England and Wales was,
in round numbers, 8,000,000; in 1811 it was
10,000,000; in 1821 it was 12,000,000; and in
1831 it was 13,000,000. There was no reason to
suppose that an increase which came very near to
2,000,000 in every decade would be arrested. Saga-
cious observers might conjecture that, as has already
happened, the inhabitants of England and Wales
would be quadrupled1 by the end of the century. This
increase belonged in the main to the operative or
industrial classes. It was stimulated by inventions
in machinery, by the making of canals, by the use of
steam, by the opening of coal mines and the like.
England was in fact changing from an agricultural
into a manufacturing country, and in the north at
any rate was becoming a vast industrial city. And
this increase in the numbers of the people coincided
with a shifting of the centres of population. Till
towards the end of the eighteenth century the
majority of the English people lived in the south and
the west of England; Bristol was, next to London,
the most important of our cities. From the beginning
of the nineteenth century, manufactures, population,
and wealth kept flowing from the south to the north
of England; new cities sprung up in Lancashire and
the northern counties where there had formerly been
nothing but wastes dotted with townlets and villages.
1 Statesman's Year Book, 1904, p. 16.

V.

Towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Liver- Lecture pool acquired a new importance, and with this change the influence of employers of labour begun to overshadow the authority of squires and merchants. The country, moreover, it is perfectly clear, was full of energetic life. The gigantic and lasting effort by which victory was at last secured in the great war with France proved the strength of the nation. It has been well noted that deficient, or rather non-existent, as was any system of national education, "there is probably no period in English history at which a greater number of poor men have risen to distinction,"1 than at the end of the eighteenth and in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.

66

"The greatest beyond comparison of self-taught poets was Burns (1759-1796). The political writer "who was at the time producing the most marked "effect was Thomas Paine (1737-1809), son of a small "tradesman. His successor in influence was William Cobbett (1762-1835), son of an agricultural labourer, "and one of the pithiest of all English writers. "William Gifford (1756-1826), son of a small tradesman in Devonshire, was already known as a satirist "and was to lead Conservatives as editor of The Quarterly Review. John Dalton (1766-1842), son "of a poor weaver, was one of the most distinguished "men of science. Porson (1759-1808), the greatest Greek scholar of his time, was son of a Norfolk parish clerk, though sagacious patrons had sent him "to Eton in his fifteenth year. The Oxford professor "of Arabic, Joseph White (1746-1814), was son of a poor weaver in the country, and a man of reputa1 Leslie Stephen, English Utilitarians, i. pp. 111, 112.