The repeal of the Corn Law was the greatest practical achievement of the Manchester School. In other matters they divided the credit with the Radicals, who were avowed followers of Bentham, and with the Peelites, who were often Utilitarian in practice though not in theory. So far as domestic policy was concerned their Liberalism was of the negative and incomplete kind. An attempt had been made in 1835 to establish agricultural training schools and model farms in Ireland. It was not enough to relieve the distress of that miserable land, but it attacked one of its most urgent problems in the right way. The Manchester men objected to their support of a particular industry by the State, and Peel and the Benthamites took the same side. In 1844 Peel ended the system of practical instruction, and the model farms were nearly all abandoned. In the same temper the Manchester School opposed Shaftesbury's Factory Bills, and if Free Trade is the best thing which they did for their country, their resistance to Factory legislation is the worst. Many of them accepted restrictions on the hours of child labour. But anything which forced the employer to regulate his buildings or his machinery or his processes in the interests of the health or safety of his workmen was opposed fiercely and persistently by the majority. They objected to any interference with adult {203} men. On a motion to inquire into the condition of journeymen bakers, Bright once spoke with a most unpleasant flippancy. "He did not see how Parliament was to interfere directly and avowedly with the labour of adult men.... He should be ashamed to stand up in defence of about two hundred stalwart Scotchmen, who could publish a Gazette of their own, and write articles in it of considerable literary merit, and appeal for a remedy to that House."[257] He and his associates overlooked the fact that the difference between a man and a woman or a child was only a difference of degree. They misunderstood the principle of all legislation of this kind. Women and children were protected not because they were women and children, but because they were economically weak. They were not organized, they were poor, and their employers could use them as they pleased. Any class of men which was economically weak was morally entitled to the same protection. To say that they were adult men was no answer to a complaint which had nothing to do with sex or age. Maleness did not of itself prevent either long hours or dirty premises. Here Radicals and Manchester men failed, and by 1867 Parliament had got no farther than to prohibit the employment of children under eight years, to restrict the hours of labour of women and youths under eighteen to ten or twelve hours a day, and to impose conditions about sanitation, ventilation, and the fencing of machinery upon some of the more unhealthy or dangerous trades. This progress, qualified by many exemptions, was all that could be won in the face of individualist opposition to