Principles of western civilisation

X1 TOWARDS THE FUTURE 409

half the infants of Manchester died before reaching the age of three years, and in which, in certain factory districts, the surviving youthful population was said to be in large part physically worn out before reaching adult age.

The first timorous attempt of the State to regulate such conditions of uncontrolled competition was made in England in the year 1802. In this it ventured as yet to interfere only on behalf of apprenticed pauper children; attempting to make no limit as to the age below which young children should not be employed, and limiting only the working hours of pauper children to twelve daily. It was not till nearly two decades later that the State attempted to interfere in England on behalf of young children generally, prohibiting the employment of those under nine years of age, and fixing a twelve hours’ day for all young persons under the age of sixteen, In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the Utilitarians had come to assert with almost the emphasis ofa religious dogma, the tendency of economic evils to cure themselves without the interference of the State, the Manchester capitalists were still vigorously and successfully challenging the principle of State interference with the conditions of the employment of “free” adult labour; and it is only from this period forward that there begins in England that long list of measures—the bearing of which in the development of modern society is even as yet not always fully perceived—in which the State, in response to the growing consciousness of the time, has interfered to an increasing degree in the relations between capital and labour.