[31] Herr W. Hasbach, “A History of the English Agricultural Labourer,” pp. 224, 225.
[32] Quoted by Cunningham, “Growth of Industry and Commerce in Modern Times,” p. 776.
[33] Quoted by B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, in “A History of Factory Legislation,” p. 15.
[34] In the Report of the Poor Law Commission we have an interesting example side by side of the two forces that make for reform. The Majority Report is altogether the work of sentiment. The proposed variation in the terminology applicable to those in receipt of relief, the loosening of the deterrent system, the advocacy of the more generous treatment of the young and the sick, the general neglect to consider remote causes, and the total absence of any consistent principle, can be explained in no other way. Its cold reception by the British Constitutional Association—that body of people who still hold aloft the tattered banners of the individualist—is but another proof that sentiment, and not the a priori assumptions of the old school, is the guiding spirit. In the Minority Report we see everywhere the mark of the imaginative reason—that reason which, starting with facts and not with theories, strives to picture the long chain of cause and effect which leads up to the sufferer, and finally, seeing the whole process in its true proportions, strikes at the evil where it begins and can be prevented, and not where it ends, when only a more or less modified failure can be looked for.
[35] A striking instance of this is supplied by the Municipal Reform Party on the London County Council. Opposed in principle to feeding or treating medically children at the cost of the rates, they have yet been compelled to do both these things. And they have been compelled to take action, not by the pressure of public opinion—the public opinion of their own side generally condemned them for forsaking their principles—but by the sheer inability of members to learn, week after week, that hungry children were unfed and sick children left without treatment.
[36] See Part X. of the Act. Needless to say, the decision as to what kinds of industry come within these definitions has exercised the ingenuity of the lawyer. In one case (Law v. Graham), for example, Lord Alverstone, Chief Justice, expressed the opinion that bottling beer is not within paragraph (i.) or paragraph (ii.) above; that by a somewhat strained construction it might be said to be within paragraph (iii.), as being an adapting of an article for sale, but that the powers used in washing the bottles was not “in aid of the process of bottling.”
[37] For complete list of such industries, see Sch. VI. of the Act.
[38] See Part VI. of the Act for details and exceptions.
[39] Sects. 103, 104, 105, 106.
[40] Sects. 71 and 156.