DARK    SATANIC    MILLS	55
bargains they chose: -legislative interference could only make
confusion worse confounded. Nine years before the Report of
1842, when Ashley had been struggling to get a bill through
Parliament limiting the hours of children in tfextile mills to ten
a day, he was opposed on the ground that the measure would
hamstring one-sixth of the nation's producing power and, by
weakening British industry in competition abroad, react fatally
• on the wages and employment of the adult worker. Even so
humane a man as Lord Althorp, then leader of the Commons,
argued it would make famine inevitable. Cobbett's common-
sense remark that the House had discovered that the stay and
bulwark of England lay, not as was hitherto supposed in her navy,
maritime commerce or colonies, but in the labour of 30,000 little
factory girls, was regarded as perverse nonsense.
For the English being bad theorists,though masters of practice
and adaptation, overlooked the fatal error in the logic of laissez-
faire, which accorded so readily with their own stubborn hatred
of tyranny and love of independence. That liberty was a sacred
blessing never to be lightly infringed and that every man should
be free were propositions that appealed to their deepest instincts.
What in their passion for liberty they failed to see was that men
were not rendered free merely because they ought to be, or by
the removal of artificial legal restrictions on trade and contract.
A child, a cripple, a pregnant woman, an epileptic or a neuras-
thenic was not free but was the slave of circumstances over which
he or she had no control. The theory that the economic price
for services and commodities could only be determined by the
unimpeded bargaining of buyer and seller assumed a different
aspect when the buyer was a rich man in no hurry to buy and the
seller a hungry wretch with a sick wife and family. Unfortunately
the English could not grasp this in theory: it was only after they
had been brought face to face with its cruel and degrading
consequences that they reacted against it. Even then, they failed
to detect the cause of the effect they deplored.	j
That the ruling classes Were so slow to perceive the evil that
was sapping the nation's health and unity was due to a com-
bination of causes unique in history. The social changes wrought
by the English inventions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
century—themselves the product of a glorious vitality, ingehuity_]
and disciplined activity of mind—were so far-reaching that men
already absorbed by the problems of an ancient, vigorous and