952

APPENDIX,

hours should be moderate, and the labour light, until such
time as the human frame is rendered by nature capable of
enduring the fatigues of adult labour. With such feelings
as these strongly pervading my mind, I need not perbaps
add that, had I been in the House of Commons during the
last session of Parliament, I should have opposed with all
my might Mr. Poulett Thomson’s measure for postponing
the operation of the clause for restricting the hours of infant
labour. I am aware that many of the advocates of the cause
of the factory children are in favour of a Ten Hours Bill for
restricting the working of the engines, which in fact would
be to limit the nse of steam in all cotton establishments (for
young persons are, I believe, at present employed in every
branch of our staple manufacture, more or less) to ten hours
a day. It has always, however, appeared to me that those
who are in favour of this policy lose sight of the very
important consequences which are involved in the principle.
Have they considered that it would be the first example of &
legislature of a free country interfering with the freedom of
adult labour ? Have they reflected that if we surrender into
the hands of Government the power to make laws to fix the
hours of labour at all, it has as good a right, upon the same
principle, to make twenty hours the standard as ten? Have
they taken into account that if the spinners and weavers are
to be protected by Act of Parliament, then the thousand
sther mechanical and laborious trades must in justice have
their claims attended to by the same tribunal? I believe it
is now nearly three hundred years ago since laws were last
enforced which regulated or interfered with the labour of
the working classes. They were the relics of the feudal
ages, and to escape from the operation of such a species of
legislation was considered as a transition from a state of
slavery to that of freedom. Now it appears to mo, however
aneongcions the advocates of such a policy may be of such