178 LAND REFORM 



The Bill was strongly opposed by the representa- 

 tives of the manufacturing class, who held that the 

 voluntary system was sufficient to supply all the allot- 

 ments that were needed. In this opposition they were 

 consistent. They had never lifted a voice against the 

 spoliation of the peasantry. They taunted the land- 

 lords with the miserable condition of the rural 

 labourers, and, at the same time, were, as a class, 

 indifferent to the shocking state of things in their 

 own factories, in which their workpeople were labouring 

 long hours for small wages, under unhealthy condi- 

 tions, while children of tender years were worked 

 almost to death. Cheap labour, and plenty of it for 

 the price paid, was the policy of the manufacturing 

 classes durinor the free-trade aoitation and after it. 

 It was on this ground that the mill-owners, as a body, 

 strongly opposed the Factory Acts.^ 



The territorial parties were notably inconsistent in 

 the display of interest with regard to allotments. 

 Their action was totally at variance with the interest 

 shown. During the years when the fruitless dis- 

 cussion was going on in the House as to whether or 

 not the labourers should have plots of land, generally 

 at a good rent, to enable them to eke out the semi- 

 starvation rations which alone their miserable wages 

 allowed, Parliament was year after year actively 

 engaged in carrying inclosure acts which destroyed 

 the remaining rights of the rural population in the 

 soil. 



1 "When children of the tenderest years were employed fourteen or 

 fifteen hours a day, and often all night ; when factory cripples were a 

 specific class of deformities constantly to be seen in the manufacturing 

 districts ; and when human life was held in small comparison to com- 

 mercial profits."—" Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury," Preface. 

 (Chapman & Hall, i8C8.) 



