ael Sadler, seized upon the
plan, and brought it before Parliament. Sadler obtained a parliamentary
committee for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee
reported in 1832. Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by
strong enemies of the factory system, for party ends. Sadler permitted
himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted
and erroneous statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of his
questions, answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted
form. The manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which
represented them as monsters, now demanded an official investigation;
they knew that an exact report must, in this case, be advantageous to
them; they knew that Whigs, genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with
whom they were upon good terms, whose principles were opposed to any
restriction upon manufacture. They obtained a commission, in due order,
composed of Liberal bourgeois, whose report I have so often cited. This
comes somewhat nearer the truth than Sadler's, but its deviations
therefrom are in the opposite direction. On every page it betrays
sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the Sadler report,
repugnance to the working-men agitating independently and the supporters
of the Ten Hours' Bill. It nowhere recognises the right of the working-
man to a life worthy of a human being, to independent activity, and
opinions of his own. It reproaches the operatives that in sustaining the
Ten Hours' Bill they thought, not of the children only, but of themselves
as well; it calls the working-men engaged in the agitation demagogues,
ill-intentioned, malicious, etc., is written, in short, on the side of
the bourgeoisie; and still it cannot whitewash the manufacturers, and
still it leaves such a mass of infamies upon the shoulders of the
employers, that even after this report, the agitation for the Ten Hours'
Bill, the hatred against the manufacturers, and the committee's severest
epithets applied to them are all fully justified. But there was the one
difference, that whereas the Sadler report accuses the manufacturers of
open, undisguised brutality, it now became evident that this brutality
was chiefly carried on under the mask of civilisation and humanity. Yet
Dr. Hawkins, the medical commissioner for Lancashire, expresses himself
decidedly in favour of the Ten Hours' Bill in the opening lines of his
report, and Commissioner Mack