Undoubtedly,however,the opposition to the factory legislation appealed to the principles accepted and most vigorously enforced by the Utilitarians.It came from the free-traders,and from the inner circle of orthodox theorists.In the later debates,Bright and Cobden,Villiers and Milner-Gibson,Bowring,Bentham's trusted disciple,Roebuck,a wayward,though at first an eager,follower,and the sturdy Joseph Hume were jealous opponents.The Edinburgh and the Westminster Reviews rivalled each other in orthodoxy.(26)The Edinburgh declared (July 1835)that Sadler's famous report was full of false statements,if not wholly false;and the Westminster (April 1833)thought that it was 'a stalking horse'to divert attention from the agitation against the corn-laws and slavery.Fraser's Magazine,on the contrary,which was attacking the economists in a series of articles,made a special point of the horrors revealed by the report.They might be summed up as 'child murder by slow torture.'The Tory organs,the Quarterly and Blackwood,took the same side.The manufacturers denied the existence of the evils alleged,complained of spies and unfair reports,and taunted the landowners with neglect of the suffering agricultural labourers.Shaftesbury says(27)that the argument most frequently used was a famous statement by Senior.That high authority had declared that all the profits of manufacturers were made in the last two hours of the twelve.Cut down the twelve to ten,and profits would disappear,and with them the manufacturing industry.(28)The same doctrine,in fact,worked into a variety of forms,sometimes fitted for practical men,and sometimes seeking the dignity of scientific formulation,was the main argument to be met.This is,in fact,typical of the economists'position.Some of them made concessions,and some of the Whigs shrank from the rigid doctrine.(29)But it was more in their way,at least,to supply 'chilling blasts'of criticism than to give any warm support.One qualification must be noticed.The agitation began from the undeniable cruelty to children.The enthusiast's view was put into epigrammatic form by Michelet.The monster Pitt had bought the manufacturers'support by the awful phrase,'take the children.'(30)In reality the employment of children had at first appeared desirable from a philanthropic point of view;but it had developed so as to involve intolerable cruelty.The hideous stories of children worked to death,or to premature decrepitude,revealed by the commissions had made a profound impression.So far the Utilitarians as moralists were bound and willing to protest.They hated slavery,and to do nothing was to permit the most detestable slavery.A child of tender years might be worked to death by brutal employers with the help of careless parents.This was fully admitted,for example,by Cobden,who said that he entirely approved of legislation for children,but held equally that adults should be encouraged to look for help to themselves and not to government.(31)Even the straitest economists seem to have admitted so much.The problem,however,remained as to the principle upon which the line must be drawn.If helpless children should be protected,have not women,or even working men in dependent positions,an equal right to protection?Moreover,can interference in one case be practically carried out without involving interference in the whole system?
The economic position was thus assailed on many points,though by enemies mutually opposed to each other.The general tendency of the economists was against government interference,and their most popular triumph on application of the do-nothing principle.In the free-trade agitation,their main opponents were the interested classes,the landowners,and the merely stupid Conservatives.Elsewhere they were opposed by a genuine,even if a misguided,philanthropy;by Conservatives who wished to meet revolution not by simple obstruction,but by rousing the government to a sense of its duties.Southey's 'paternal government'might be ridiculed by Macaulay and the Whigs;Cobbett's good old times might be treated as the figment of an ignorant railer.The Young Englanders who found their gospel in Disraeli's Sibyl might be taken to represent mere fanciful antiquarianism masquerading as serious politics;and Carlyle,with his fierce denunciations of the 'dismal science'in Chartism and the Latter-Day Pamphlets set down as an eccentric and impatient fanatic naturally at war with sound reason.The appropriate remedy,as Mill thought,was a calm,scientific exposition of sound principles.His adversaries,as he thought,reproduced in the main the old sentimentalism against which Bentham and James Mill had waged war,taking a new colouring from a silly romanticism and weak regrets for a picturesque past.But there was a perplexing fact.Churchmen and Tories were acting as leaders of the very classes to whom Radicals look for their own natural allies.Shaftesbury complained that he could not get the evangelicals to take up the factory movement.(32)They had been the mainstay of the anti-slavery movement,but they did not seem to be troubled about white slavery.The reason,no doubt,was obvious;the evangelicals were mainly of the middle class,and class prejudices were too strong for the appeals to religious principles.On the other hand,the Radical artisans would accept men like Sadler or Shaftesbury for leaders as a drowning man may accept help from an enemy.The point of agreement was simply that something should be done,and that was enough to alienate the poor man from Whigs and Utilitarians,who were always proving that nothing should be done.
