INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND.* "A PRELIMINARY sketch-map which may assist the explorer,"
is Mr. Innes's description of his book, and it is happily worded. The subject is indeed vast. General principles of the gravest importance are involved, and there is a multitude of details, many of them of a perplexing kind, about which it is often difficult even to ascertain the facts. How much is suggested by such words and names, to take a few out of many, as Villanus and Sokeman, Manor and ViU, Craft Gilds, the Statute of Labourers, Common Lands and Enclosures, Corn Laws, Navigation Laws, Poor Laws, Land Tax, Factory Acts, and Trade Unions ! The Statute of Labourers and the Factory Acts may be taken as especially significant examples. On the first of these Mr. Innes states a case for the side which is commonly left undefended—the ruling class. "No one had a right to turn a national emergency to his own profit," words which have gained a peculiar weight at the moment -of writing; that is, in the midst of a coal strike. And the statute was nothing more than "an attempt to enforce by legislation conditions which every one knew to be desirable." It was a failure because it tried to compass a great end by means which were, and, indeed, always must be, inadequate. Only we have to remember, if we would rightly estimate the intelligence as well as the motives of the legislating classes of that age, that there were but the scantiest means of esti- mating the real amount of the forces which it was sought to control or modify. We will pass over some five centuries and come to the Factory Acts, the most important of the many legislative enactments which have intervened between capital and labour. The history is a very curious one, taking us as it does from the tentative efforts of the Manchester Committee of 1784 down to the Act of 1860. It was a slow business—at least according to present-day reckoning of time. The Man- chester Committee made it its aim to shorten the hours of labour for children under fourteen, and half a century later children of nine were working nine hours a day, where the law was duly observed, and might be working much more where it was evaded. We cannot but say a good word here for Robert Owen, who in his own cotton mills anticipated by many years the benevolent legislation of a later day. We warmly recommend Mr. Innee's manual.
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