News came across the Atlantic from Boston, 1846, that Dr. Morton had rendered surgery painless by the use of ether.  Before a year passed the English hospitals were employing it.  Sir James Y. Simpson of Edinburgh introduced chloroform (1847).  These two agents have abolished the terror of the surgeon’s knife, and have lengthened life by making it possible to perform a class of operations which formerly very few patients had been able to bear.

A score of years later Sir Joseph Lister called attention to the important results obtained by antiseptic methods in surgery; next came (1895) the introduction from Germany of the marvelous X ray, by whose help the operator can photograph and locate a bullet or other foreign substance which he is endeavoring to extract.  Together, these discoveries have saved multitudes of lives.

616.  Progress of the Laboring Classes; Free Trade, 1846.

At the date of the Queen’s accession a number of laws existed restricting the free action of workingmen.  Only three years before Victoria’s coronation six poor agricultural laborers in Dorsetshire were transported (1834) to penal servitude at Botany Bay, Australia, for seven years, for peacefully combining to secure an increase of their wages, which at that time were only six shilling a week.  In fact, the so-called “Conspiracy Laws,” which made Labor Unions liable to prosecution as unlawful, if not actually criminal organizations, were not wholly repealed until after the opening of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile Parliament passed the Trade Union Acts, in 1871 and 1876, which recognized the right of workingmen to form associations to protect their interests by the use of all measures not forbidden by the Common Law.[1] In 1906 the persistent political pressure of organized labor induced a Liberal Cabinet (of which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was Prime Minister) and the invariably Conservative House of Lords to pass a still more important act.  That measure exempted Trade Unions from liability to pay damages for a certain class of injuries which they might commit in carrying on a strike.[2] During the above period of more than thirty years the unions have gained very largely in numbers and in financial as well as political strength.  On the other hand they now have to contend with the radical Socialists who are seeking to convert England into a republic in which the government would carry on all industries and would prohibit private individuals from conducting any business whatever.

[1] One result of the organization of Trades or Labor Unions has been the shortening of the hours of labor.  In 1894 the Government established an eight-hour day for workingmen in dockyards and in ordnance factories. [2] The Trade Disputes Act of 1906.  This forbids any suit for tort against a Trade Union.  See A. L. Lowell’s “The Government of England,” II, 534; and S. Gompers in The Outlook for February, 1911, p. 269.