[175] In 1823 George White, a “clerk of committees” of the House of Commons, had formed an alliance with Gravener Henson, the bobbin-net maker of Nottingham, who had long been a leader of the framework-knitters’ combinations, to whom reference has been made in preceding pages. Together they prepared an elaborate Bill repealing all the Combination Acts, and substituting a complicated machinery for regulating piecework and settling industrial disputes. Some of these proposals were meritorious anticipations of subsequent factory legislation; but the time was not ripe for such measures. This Bill, promptly introduced by Peter Moore, the member for Coventry, had the effect of scaring some timid legislators, and especially alarming the Front Bench. Hume was at a loss to know how to act; but Place, in a letter displaying great political sagacity, advised him to baulk the rival Bill by putting its author on the Committee of Inquiry, explaining that “Moore is not a man to be put aside. The only way to put him down is to let him talk his nonsense in the Committee, where, being outvoted, he will be less of an annoyance in the House.” See Place MSS. 27798--12. [176] Place MSS. 27798--30. [177] This attracted the attention of the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers, 40--18). [178] Place offered to act as Hume’s “assistant”; but the members of the Committee, whose suspicions had been aroused, refused to permit him to remain in the room, on the double ground that he was not a member of the House, nor even a gentleman! [179] Place MSS. 27798--22. [180] _Ibid._ 27798--23. [181] Place MS. 27798--22. [182] The Act was 5 George IV. c. 95. The question of the exportation of machinery was deferred until the next session. [183] Letter in the _Manchester Gazette_, preserved in the Place MSS. 27801--214. [184] MS. Report of Nassau Senior to Lord Melbourne on Trade Combinations (1831; unpublished; in Home Office Library). [185] _Sheffield Iris_, April 2, 1825. [186] _Sheffield Mercury_, October 8, 1825; see the _Manchester Guardian_ for August 1824 to a similar effect. [187] Later in the year Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, and Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, protested in debate that they had been quite unaware of the passing of the Act, and that they would never have assented to it. [188] The _Annual Register_ for 1825 gives a fuller report of Huskisson’s speech than Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Further particulars are supplied in George White’s _Abstract of the Act repealing the Laws against Combinations of Workmen_ (1824); in Place’s _Observations on Mr. Huskisson’s Speech on the Law relating to Combinations of Workmen_, by F. P. (1825, 32 pp.); in Wallas’s _Life of Francis Place_, revised edition, 1918, ch. viii.; in Hammond’s _The Town Labourer_, ch. vii.; and in Howell’s _Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders_, pp. 51-7.