Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SIR ROBERT PEEL. J. R. Thursfield.
SIR ROBERT PEEL. Justin McCarthy.
BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES. Walter Bagehot.

VIII

SHAFTESBURY AND PHILANTHROPY

[ANTONY ASHLEY COOPER, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, born April 28, 1801; died October 1, 1885; educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford (first-class in classics, 1822); Member of Parliament 1826; bore a leading hand in legislation for improving condition of laboring classes; President of Ragged School Union, etc.; succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father, in 1851.]

The industrial expansion of England in the nineteenth century was not a blessing unalloyed. It built great cities and created enormous wealth, and gave employment at advanced wages to a vastly increased population. But it brought with it changes in the social condition of the laboring classes which were productive of severe hardship.

The England of the olden time had been an agricultural country whose laborers, though poorly paid, either worked under mild conditions in the fields, or followed their trades in their cottages and workshops. The introduction of the steam engine brought with it a demand for fuel which forced thousands of men, women, and children to delve in the mines, and the use of machines and the adoption of the factory system shut up other thousands of both sexes, and all ages, to labor for excessive hours in crowded cities under unsanitary conditions. At the present time the system of legislation regarding the employment of women and minors, and the regulation of unsanitary conditions of labor is so thorough that it is difficult to conceive that it has all been of recent growth. When the enemies of the abuses in mine and factory first raised their voices in the British Parliament, they were even told that such things were not proper subjects of legislation. In the opening years of the century the elder Robert Peel had attacked one of the foulest of industrial abuses—the "apprentice system." Under this system the pauper children of London and the south of England were rented out to the tender mercies of the avaricious cotton manufacturers of the north. From the age of seven they were compelled to work in the mills at long hours, under unhealthful conditions, and without opportunity of education or proper recreation. When not at work they were huddled in comfortless barracks little better than slave-pens. No wonder they grew up to be hopeless and brutalized, if they were so unfortunate as to survive the arduous period of their industrial bondage—for it was no less than that. Peel's act of 1802, and other remedial legislation which supplemented it, did away with the worst features of this white slavery, but the general condition of the women and children in the English factories and mines continued to be such as to move deeply the sympathies of the humane.

In the year 1833 the little group of humanitarian leaders who had succeeded in turning the attention of the nation to the disgraceful condition of child labor, were striving to get a hearing in the House of Commons for their "short time" proposal— a law framed by Michael Thomas Sadler, for the purpose of limiting the hours of child labor in textile factories to ten hours a day. Sadler had lost his seat in Parliament, and a new spokesman was needed for the cause. The committee ventured to ask Lord Ashley to take charge of the bill, and his acceptance enlisted in the humanitarian movement a young man who was destined to be its champion for half a century.

Antony Ashley Cooper, then sitting in the House of Commons under the name of Lord Ashley, and after 1851 known to the world as the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the century. This new-found champion of the working-classes was born in London, April 28, 1801. His father was the sixth Earl of Shaftesbury, and his mother was a daughter of the third Earl of Marlborough. The father's preoccupation in public life and his mother's social duties left the early home training of the lad to a pious domestic, an earnest Christian, whose precepts and example did more than anything else to give bent to his life. In later years the Earl freely owned his mother's housekeeper to be the best friend he had ever had. He did little to distinguish himself as a schoolboy at Harrow, but Oxford appealed to him, and he applied himself to classical studies at the university with a zeal which won for him a degree with the first honors.

Parliament was the natural place for a peer's son in those days of pocket boroughs, and into the House of Commons he went as Lord Ashley at the age of twenty-five. In his diary he recorded his devout purpose to use his position "for the success of religion and true happiness," and on taking the oaths he "breathed a slight prayer for assistance in thoughts and deeds." A man of profound introspection, intense religious feeling, and sincere purpose to be of service to his kind, had some difficulty in adjusting himself to the selfish politics of the House. The first subject upon which he found voice was the reform of the laws for the care of lunatic paupers, a class whose pitiable state might have moved the most stolid heart. To this merciful project he addressed himself with a zeal and persistency which were to characterize his later efforts for other downtrodden classes.