s
absurd and barbarous as an ordeal by touch or a witch-burning."
Militarism, that mischievous counterfeit of true soldierly spirit,
could not thrive where the duel was discountenanced; and the friends
of peace might rejoice with reason.

But those peaceful agitators, the sagacious, energetic Cobden and his
allies, resented rather sharply the interference of the Lord Ashley
of that day with the "natural laws" of the labour market--laws to
whose operation some of the party attributed the cruelly excessive
hours of work in factories, and the indiscriminate employment of all
kinds of labour, even that of the merest infants. Undeterred by
these objections, convinced that no law which sanctioned and promoted
cruelty did so with true authority, Lord Ashley persisted in the
struggle on which he had entered 1833; in 1842 he scored his first
great success in the passing of an Act that put an end to the
employment of women and children in mines and collieries; in 1844 the
Government carried their Factories Act, which lessened and limited
the hours of children's factory labour, and made other provisions for
their benefit. It was not all that he had striven for, but it was
much; he accepted the compromise, but did not slacken in his efforts
still further to improve the condition of the children. His career of
steady benevolence far outstretched this early period of battle and
endurance; but already his example and achievement were fruitful of
good, and his fellow-labourers were numerous. Nothing succeeds like
success: people had sneered at the mania for futile legislation that
possessed the "humanity-monger" who so embarrassed party leaders with
his crusade on behalf of mere mercy and justice; they now approved
the practical philanthropist who had taken away a great reproach from
his nation, and glorified the age in which they lived because of its
special humaneness, while they exulted not less in the brightening
prospects of the country. Sedition overcome, law and order
triumphant, the throne standing firm, prosperity returning--all
ministered to pride and hope.

In 1850 there had been some painful incidents; the death by an
unhappy accident of Sir Robert Peel, and the turbulent excitement of
what are known as the "No Popery" disturbances, being the most
notable: and of these again incomparably the most important was the
untimely loss to the country of the great and honest statesman who
might otherwise have rendered still more