Outwardly the British world had altered. Internal warfare had passed away, and the war-horse was no longer visible in harvest-fields. The scene now presents a resemblance to a huge hive of bees industriously secreting and amassing honey for future use. Great Britain has assumed beyond her own shores a foremost place among civilized nations. The resources of her newly-created wealth seem boundless, and everywhere her power is felt. She can thin the ranks of her population, and swell her army to conquer and suppress the tyrant Napoleon, while keeping at work the enormous leviathan of her own trade and commerce by the deft fingers of her little children. Summer and winter find her tiny bees—infants of seven or eight—at labour in the factories from six a.m. to noon. One hour for dinner is allowed, and they toil on once more till eight o’clock at night. Were these, then, the “good old times” of which we are proud? At all events they _were_ the times in which England’s greatness was established and vast fortunes were built up, founded upon the industry of young children sweating in factories for thirteen hours a day. “It was not in exceptional cases,” wrote Robert Dale Owen, when on a tour of inspection of factories with his father in 1815, “but as a rule, that we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour’s interval for the midday meal, eaten in the factory.” In the fine yarn cotton mills, the “temperature usually exceeded 75 degrees,” and in all factories the atmosphere was more or less injurious to the lungs. In some cases “greed of gain had impelled mill-owners to still greater extremes of inhumanity, utterly disgraceful to a civilized nation.” Their mills were run fifteen, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, and children were employed even under the age of eight. “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were cripples or otherwise deformed. Most of the overseers openly carried stout leather thongs, and frequently we saw even the youngest children severely beaten.” (_Threading my Way_, p. 102.) At that period Robert Owen the elder expressed himself thus to the Earl of Liverpool: “It would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have less humanity than any other class of men.” The system was what Robert Owen condemned, and he strained every nerve to bring about some alterations in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for the protection of children by law, and for their compulsory education, and he publicly exposed the ghastly evils that spring from competition unchecked by law, while left free to regulate itself at any amount of cost to life, health, and happiness.