The grounds for this drastic measure appear to have been found in the marked increase of Trade Unionism among workers of various kinds. The operatives’ combinations were regarded as being in the nature of mutiny against their employers and masters; destructive of the “discipline” necessary to the expansion of trade; and interfering with the right of the employer to “do what he liked with his own.” The immediate occasion was a petition from London engineering employers, complaining of an alarming strike of the millwrights. This led to a Bill suppressing combination in the engineering trade, which was passed by the House of Commons, in spite of the protests of Sir Francis Burdett and Benjamin Hobhouse. The measure was, however, dropped in the House of Lords in favour of a more comprehensive Bill, applicable to all trades, which Whitbread had suggested. This was introduced on June 17, 1799, by William Pitt himself, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who referred to the alarming growth of combination, not merely in the Metropolis but also in the north of England. Subsequent stages of the Bill were moved by George Rose, another member of the Administration; and the measure was hurried through all its stages in both Houses with great rapidity, receiving the Royal Assent only twenty-four days after its introduction into the House of Commons. There was therefore little opportunity for any effective demonstration against its provisions, but the Journeymen Calico-printers’ Society of London petitioned against the measure, and instructed counsel to put forward their objections. They represented that, although the Bill professed merely “to prevent unlawful combinations,” it created “new crimes of so indefinite a nature that no one journeyman or workman will be safe in holding any conversation with another on the subject of his trade or employment.” Only a few other petitions were presented, and, though Benjamin Hobhouse opposed it in the Commons and Lord Holland in the Lords, the Bill passed unaltered into law.[117]