The erection of hospitals was at once commenced. The first was opened in January, 1870, and the isolated treatment of many cases of infectious disease was of great benefit to the community.
In 1867, too, Parliament again dealt with the condition of the workers in Factories and Workshops. The legislation dealt with the kingdom as a whole, but inasmuch as London was so great a manufacturing city, it affected also the masses of the working population of the metropolis.
The Commissioners on Children’s Employment, who had been at work since 1862, had completed their inquiry, and made many recommendations, and in the concluding part of their fifth report, dated 1866, they wrote:—
“We heartily trust that we may have thus, in some degree, contributed to bring the time nearer when so many hundreds of thousands of your Majesty’s poorer subjects of the working classes—especially the very young and those of the tenderer sex—will be relieved from the totally unnecessary burden and oppression of overtime, and night work; will be confined to the reasonable and natural limits of the factory hours … will perform their daily labour under more favourable sanitary conditions, breathing purer air, amid greater cleanliness, and protected against causes specially injurious to health and tending to depress their vigour and shorten their lives.”
Only in 1867 was factory legislation at last of an approximately general character.
“Fully two-thirds of the century in which England’s industrial supremacy swept to its climax was allowed to pass before even an attempt was made to regulate on sound general principles the recognised and inevitable workings of unchecked individualism in the industrial field.”[111]
The Act of 1867[112] made better provision for regulating the hours during which children, young persons, and women, were to be permitted to labour in any manufacturing process conducted in an establishment where fifty or more persons are employed—the regulation being in the direction of less onerous conditions of labour.
And by another Act passed at the same time—“The Workshop Regulation Act, 1867,”[113] the protection afforded to workers in factories was extended to workers in smaller establishments, so far as regarded the regulations relating to the hours of labour to children, young persons, and women.
“Workshop” was defined as—