A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

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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CHAPTER LXXV.

THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND.

[Sidenote: 1832—"Dark Rosaleen">[

A saying which has been ascribed to a well-known living Englishman, who has made a name for himself in letters as well as in politics, may be used as the introduction to this chapter. The saying was that no man should ever be sent as Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland who could not prove that he had thoroughly mastered the meaning of the noble Irish poem rendered by Clarence Mangan as "Dark Rosaleen." The author and statesman to whom we refer used to point the moral of his observation, sometimes, by declaring that many or most of the political colleagues for whose benefit he had spoken had never heard either of Clarence Mangan or of "Dark Rosaleen." Now, as it is barely possible that some of the readers of this volume may be in a condition of similar ignorance, it is well to mention that Clarence Mangan was an Irish poet who was dear to the generation which saw the rise of the Young Ireland movement during O'Connell's later years, and that the dark Rosaleen whom Mangan found in the earlier poet's ballad is supposed to typify his native country. The idea of the author and statesman was that no Englishman who had not studied this poem, and got at the heart of its mystery, so far as to be able to realize the deep poetic, pathetic love of the Celtic heart for the soil, the traditions, and the ways of the Celtic island, could attempt with any success to undertake the government of the country. We have now come to a period in this history when the Irish question, as it is called, came up once again, and in a new form, to try the statesmanship of English rulers. We have told the story of '98, and how the rebellion ended in complete defeat and disaster. Up to the {206} time at which we have now arrived there was no more talk of rebellion in the field, but in the sullen heart of Irish discontent there still lived all the emotions which had animated Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet.

[Sidenote: 1832—The tithe question in Ireland]