The ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day to attract general attention.  We have already alluded to the Apprentices’ Act of 1802.  Later, towards 1817, Robert Owen, then a manufacturer in New Lanark, in Scotland, afterwards founder of English Socialism, began to call the attention of the Government, by memorials and petitions, to the necessity of legislative guarantees for the health of the operatives, and especially of children.  The late Sir Robert Peel and other philanthropists united with him, and gradually secured the Factory Acts of 1818, 1825, and 1831, of which the first two were never enforced, and the last only here and there.  This law of 1831, based upon the motion of Sir J. C. Hobhouse, provided that in cotton mills no one under twenty-one should be employed between half-past seven at night and half-past five in the morning; and that in all factories young persons under eighteen should work no longer than twelve hours daily, and nine hours on Saturday.  But since operatives could not testify against their masters without being discharged, this law helped matters very little.  In the great cities, where the operatives were more restive, the larger manufacturers came to an agreement among themselves to obey the law; but even there, there were many who, like the employers in the country, did not trouble themselves about it.  Meanwhile, the demand for a ten hours’ law had become lively among the operatives; that is, for a law which should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work longer than ten hours daily; the Trades Unions, by their agitation, made this demand general throughout the manufacturing population; the philanthropic section of the Tory party, then led by Michael Sadler, seized upon the plan, and brought it before Parliament.  Sadler obtained a parliamentary committee for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee reported in 1832.  Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system, for party ends.  Sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of his questions, answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted form.  The manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which represented them as monsters, now demanded an official investigation; they knew that an exact report must, in this case, be advantageous to them; they knew that Whigs, genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with whom they were upon good terms, whose principles were opposed to any restriction upon manufacture.  They obtained a commission, in due order, composed of Liberal bourgeois, whose report I have so often cited.  This comes somewhat nearer the truth than Sadler’s, but its deviations therefrom are in the opposite direction.  On every page it betrays sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the Sadler report, repugnance to the working-men