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In a brief historical review of the political and industrial changes which took place just before the reform of the English poor-laws, Devine protests against the dominant idea that the lax administration of relief was solely or even chiefly responsible for the deplorable prevalence of pauperism in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He says: --

"England was saved from pauperization, revolution, and other unforeseen disasters, not by deciding to distribute less relief or by deciding that the able-bodied poor, if assisted at all, should be assisted only in the workhouse, wise as these decisions were, but by the rise of religious and political liberty, by introducing in advance of other countries modern forms of agriculture and industry, by developing her commerce and trade, by the adoption of a more nearly democratic organization of society, and by listening to the voice of humane and public-spirited counsels. The lessening of the poor rates was made practicable by and was not the principal cause of the progress of the period." (13)

Seligman regards the abuses of the early nineteenth century as chiefly due to the change from the domestic to the factory system. "The old poor-law," he says, "did not create English poverty, and the new poor-law did not abolish it." (14)

But whatever view be taken of the relative significance of the poor-law and of poor-law reform as an explanation of the misery of English laborers and their subsequent progress, the economists of the time were right in standing out for the restriction and modification of public poor-relief.

The laxness of administration may have come in part from the humanitarian bearings of the doctrine of political equality and in part from greater actual need, resulting from the war taxes, the primitive methods of agriculture, industry, and commerce, and other unreformed features of English life of that period; but whatever its cause, it had become by 1832 wholly mischievous. Even if regarded as merely one element in a transitional period, it still is no exception to the established principle that the offer of relief upon easy terms is demoralizing.

In the other struggle of the same period, that for factory legislation, the economists and philanthropists were distinctly opposed; but this time it was the economists that were deservedly beaten. The issue involved the welfare of three hundred thousand operatives, male and female, in the factories of England, and of forty thousand children under thirteen years of age. The question was complicated with many political considerations and was championed by the conservatives, not so much perhaps because the country gentlemen sympathized with the mill-hands, as because it seemed a method by which they could get even with the representatives of the manufacturing towns for the repeal of the corn-laws. Lord Ashley, afterward the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader in the fight for the protection of the operatives, is now acknowledged to have been actuated by the purest motives; but at the time he was bitterly attacked as a "humanity-monger" by the practical men who opposed him. Cobden, in a private letter, sneered at this "canting" and joined with Professor Senior and Miss Martineau in supplying the scientific weapons of offence and defence for such men as John Bright and Gladstone and Peel and Lord Brougham among the politicians.

A majority of economists, both in and out of Parliament, were against the factory acts. Indeed, nearly all the arguing that was done on economic grounds was against the acts.

In a paper which, curiously enough, is the Golden prize essay for 1891, Jeans observes: --

"Lord Shaftesbury and his opponents played a veritable game of cross questions. They attacked him, for instance, with the threatened ruin of English trade, and the pauperization of the working-class, and he would reply by pointing to the great sanitary or moral or religious benefits which must accrue." (15)

As the Earl of Shaftesbury himself said: "To practical prophecies of overthrow of trade, of ruin to the operatives themselves, I could only oppose 'humanity' and general principles." (16) Sir John Kussell is said to have been converted to support the acts, not by labored arguments, but by being induced to walk back and forth in his parlor for a time over a track similar to that which many of the child operatives had to travel for twelve or more hours a day.

It was sympathy for the operatives, not an appreciation of the good results to be got for English industry by the factory acts, that secured their passage. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, "they were passed in the name of the moral and physical health of the community." Yet Shaftesbury's speech of May, 1847, and Macaulay's speech on the ten-hour bill, gave evidence of what a strong case might have been made out for the acts on economic grounds; but these were Almost the only examples of such argumentation. (17)