Now one would suppose on first thoughts that the Factory Acts would have been opposed by all the employers and supported by all their employees. But there are good employers as well as bad ones; and there are ignorant and shortsighted laborers as well as wise ones. The employers who had tender consciences, or who, like some of the Quakers, had a form of religion which compelled them to think sometimes of what they were doing by throwing all the responsibility for it on themselves and not on any outside authority like the professors of Capitalist political economy, were greatly troubled by the condition of their employees. You may ask why, in that case, they did not treat them better. The answer is that if they had done so they would have been driven out of business and ruined by the bad employers. It would have occurred in this way. Cheap sweated labor meant not only bigger profits: it also meant cheaper goods. If the good employer paid a decent living wage to his workpeople, and worked them for eight hours a day instead of from twelve to sixteen, he had to charge high enough prices for his goods to enable him to pay such wages. But in that case the bad employer could and would at once offer the same goods at a lower price and thus take all the good employer’s customers away from him. The good employer was therefore obliged to join Lord Shaftesbury in telling the Government that unless laws were passed to force all employers, good and bad alike, to behave better, there could never be any improvement, because the good employers would have either to sweat the workers like the bad ones, or else be driven out of business, leaving matters worse than ever. They found that social problems cannot be solved by personal righteousness, and that under Capitalism not only must men be made moral by Act of Parliament, but cannot be made moral in any other way, no matter how benevolent their dispositions may be.