I02 THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



short food supply — a most promising state of mind, 

 we may observe, by the way, for the ministrations of 

 the great evangelical reformers of the period, who 

 were genuinely concerned with the state of souls in 

 *' this carnival of bestial drunkenness." The local and 

 ephemeral movements towards improvement became 

 national under the influence of earnest men like Wilber- 

 force, at that time member of Parliament for one of the 

 divisions of Yorkshire, where the rapid growth of a new 

 manufacturing population had brought about an obvious 

 break-down of the primitive organization. Gradually 

 large numbers of the people were driven by economic 

 pressure into the newly established factories, which, as 

 mechanical inventions multiplied, required immense 

 supplies of labour, while the rapid enclosure of common 

 lands disorganized the life of the country-side. The 

 old relations between masters and workmen came to an 

 end, and the country was brought face to face with the 

 misery of uncertain labour, divorced from the land and 

 its natural leaders, and constantly thrown out of place 

 by improving machinery. The Parish authorities in 

 the large towns used the factory districts as dumping- 

 grounds for the children growing up under their care. 

 They were permitted to include a small percentage of 

 idiots or feeble-minded children in their quota of normal 

 human supplies. Such, briefly, were some of the con- 

 ditions associated with the early years of the industrial 

 expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ; 

 such were the circumstances that, later on, led to the 

 long series of enactments afl^ecting child labour and life 

 in the factories. Two and a half centuries earlier, 

 somewhat similar circumstances, bringing about a like 



