ry labor in these
countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William
the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found
that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection
of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of ships, or
the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of
goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world.
Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and,
while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the
workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an
entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention
of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization
was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority,
there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which
civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely
expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between
capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory
naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in
manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was
found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the
course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was
opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of
labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very
best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they
employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to
interfere with them and those who worked for them, and that the civil
law could do only harm and no good by its best-intentioned interference.

The whole controversy has now been long settled, and it is a distinctly
understood condition of our social system that the State has a right to
interfere between employer and employed when the condition of things is
such that the employed is not always able to protect himself. At the
time when Lord Ashley started on his long and beneficent career there
was practically no law which regulated the hours and the conditions of
labor in the great factories. The whole factory system, the modern
factory system as we understand it, was then quite a new part of our
social organization. The factory, with its little army of workers,