leading abolitionists and supported by the people, deserves the chief honor of the victory. All the countries that make up the kingdom, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, sent their authorized speakers to sustain the cause of freedom for the slaves. The gift, which on the recommendation of Lord Grey's Ministry was placed at the disposal of the West Indian planters, was indeed a lavish gift; but the public in general made little complaint on the score of its lavishness, and did not calculate too jealously the value of the sacrifice which the State was invited to make for the purchase of negro emancipation. Thirty years and more had to pass before the great American republic was able to free itself from the curse of slavery, and even then the late deliverance was only accomplished at the cost of a war which threatened for the season a permanent division of the States. [Sidenote: 1833--Labor legislation] The same year which saw the passing of the measure for the abolition of slavery in the colonies saw also the passing of an Act which interfered seriously, for the first time, with something which might almost be called a system of domestic slavery. We are speaking now of the measure which dealt with the conditions of factory labor in these countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of ships, or the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world. Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and, while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority, there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to