Lord Shaftesbury]

Lord Ashley, whom many of us can well remember as Lord Shaftesbury, may
be said to have given up the whole of his life to the general purpose
with which he began his public career--the object of endeavoring to
mitigate the toils and sufferings of those who have to work hard in
order to provide for others the comforts and the luxuries of life. His
principle was that the State has always a right to interfere for the
protection of those who cannot protect themselves. He was not a man of
great statesmanlike ability, he was not a man of extensive or varied
information, he was not a scholar, he was not an orator, he was not in
the ordinary sense of the word a thinker, but he was a man who had, by
a kind of philanthropic instinct, got hold of an idea which men of far
greater intellect had not, up to his time, shown themselves able to
grasp. The story of his life is part of the whole story of the
industrial development of modern civilization. Again and again he
worked with success in movement after movement, initiated mainly by
himself, for the protection and the education of those who toil in our
factories and in our mines. Some day no doubt Parliament may have to
devise legislation which shall do for the women and children employed
in field labor something like that which Lord Ashley did for the women
and children employed in factories and in mines. We have seen that
already efforts are made in every session of Parliament to extend the
principle of the factory legislation into various industrial
occupations which are common to city life. For the present, however,
we have only to deal with the fact that one of the first labors
accomplished by the Reformed Parliament was the establishment of that
legislative principle with which Lord Ashley's name will always be
associated.

Let it be added that, with the establishment of that principle, came
also the introduction of two innovations in our {204} factory system
which lent inestimable value to the whole measure. One of these was
the appointment of a number of factory inspectors, who were authorized
to see that the purposes of the Act were properly carried out by the
employers, and to report to the Government as to the working of the
whole system and the necessity for further improvements. The other was
the arrangement by which a portion of the time of all the younger
workers in the factories was set apart for educational purposes, so
that children s