can party came into power pledged to "a
complete and satisfactory homestead measure" that the Homestead Act of
1862 was placed on the statute books.

A characteristic manifestation of the humanitarian impulse of the
forties was the support given to labor in its renewed demand for a
ten-hour day. It has already been indicated how this movement started
in the thirties, how its object was achieved by a few highly organized
trades, and how it was interrupted in its progress by the panic of 1837.
The agitation, however, to make the ten-hour day customary throughout
the country was not long in coming back to life. In March, 1840, an
executive order of President Van Buren declaring ten hours to be the
working day for laborers and mechanics in government employ forced the
issue upon private employers. The earliest concerted action, it
would seem, arose in New England, where the New England Workingmen's
Association, later called the Labor Reform League, carried on the
crusade. In 1845 a committee appointed by the Massachusetts Legislature
to investigate labor conditions affords the first instance on record of
an American legislature concerning itself with the affairs of the labor
world to the extent of ordering an official investigation. The committee
examined a number of factory operatives, both men and women, visited a
few of the mills, gathered some statistics, and made certain neutral and
specious suggestions. They believed the remedy for such evils as they
discovered lay not in legislation but "in the progressive improvement
in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man's destiny, in a
less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and
intellectual superiority."

The first ten-hour law was passed in 1847 by the New Hampshire
Legislature. It provided that "ten hours of actual labor shall be taken
to be a day's work, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties," and that
no minor under fifteen years of age should be employed more than ten
hours a day without the consent of parent or guardian. This was the
unassuming beginning of a movement to have the hours of toil fixed by
society rather than by contract. This law of New Hampshire, which was
destined to have a widespread influence, was hailed by the workmen
everywhere with delight; mass meetings and processions proclaimed it as
a great victory; and only the conservatives prophesied the worthlessness
of such legislation. Horace Greeley sympathetically d