This refusal of redress by legislation was the more exasperating because it was accompanied by a prohibition of redress by combination. Parliament would neither help the workmen nor allow them to help themselves. Attempts to organize Trade Unions were discouraged or actively suppressed. In 1799 and 1800 two Combination Acts were passed, which made illegal all contracts between workmen for obtaining an advance in wages, for reducing hours of employment, for preventing employers from employing any particular workman, or for controlling any person in the management of his business. Breach of the Acts was made a criminal offence, punishable by fine and imprisonment.[84] Combinations of employers were nominally prohibited in precisely the same way, but in the political circumstances of the time the law was enforced only against the men. Trade Unions, in fact, continued to exist, and in many trades they succeeded in arranging wages with the masters. So long as the relations of employers and employed were friendly, the Acts were left alone. But when a strike began they were brought into operation, and the workpeople were forcibly reminded of the consequences of political impotence. Large numbers of them were thus reduced to the same state as the agricultural labourers, and lived on scanty wages, eked out by charity and the Poor Law. The Industrial Revolution thus gradually transformed society, and created what were substantially two new classes of people, of which the first was by nature averse to Conservatism, and the second was by circumstances made restless and eager for change. The successive events of the American Rebellion and the French Revolution fell upon this changing society like flame upon {79} stubble. But a few years before the dispute with the Colonies came to a head, there took place a sort of preliminary demonstration of the principles which that controversy forced into prominence. Speculation had brought a small body of Englishmen to definite support of manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the substitution of pledged delegates for representatives with freedom of action. These principles were simply the logical extreme of Liberalism. If every man is to be regarded as equal with every other, then every man must have a vote. If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to exercise it as soon as he becomes entitled to it, and therefore Parliament must be dissolved every year in order to permit the new voters to express their wishes. If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to vote not merely on general principles of policy, but on details, and his representative must be instructed to vote for or against without using his own discretion. This abstract reasoning had not affected any large proportion of the population. The Duke of Richmond was the most distinguished of these speculators; John Cartwright, a naval officer, who afterwards became a major in the militia, was the most voluminous of their