All the protestations of the employers that they would be ruined by the Factory Acts were contradicted by experience. By better management, more and better machinery, and speeding up the work, they made bigger profits than ever. If they had been half as clever as they claimed to be, they would have imposed on themselves all the regulations the Factory Acts imposed on them, without waiting to be forced by law. But profiteering does not cultivate men’s minds as public service does. The greatest advances in industrial organization have been forced on employers in spite of their piteous protests that they would be unable to carry on under them, and that British industry must consequently perish. It may shock you to learn that the employees themselves resisted the Factory Acts at first because the Acts began by putting a stop to the ill treatment and overworking of children too young to be decently put to commercial work at all. At first these victims of unregulated Capitalism were little Oliver Twists, sold into slavery by the Guardians of the Poor to get rid of them. But the later generations were the children of the employees; and the wage on which the employee kept his family in squalid poverty was added to by the children’s earnings. When people are very poor the loss of a shilling a week is much worse than the loss of £500 a week to a millionaire: it means, for the woman who has a desperate struggle to keep the house and make both ends meet every Saturday, that her task becomes impossible. It is easy for comparatively rich people to say “You should not send your young children out to work under such inhuman conditions”, or, “You should rejoice in a new Factory Act which makes such infamies impossible”. But if the immediate result of listening to them is that the children who were only half starved before are now to be three-quarters starved, such pious remonstrances produce nothing but exasperation. The melancholy truth is that, as the Factory Acts were passed one after another, gradually raising the age at which children might be employed in factories from infancy to fourteen and sixteen, and half the children’s time below a certain age had to be spent in school, the parents were the fiercest opponents of the Acts; and when they got the vote, and became able to influence Parliament directly, they made it impossible for anybody to get elected as a member for a factory town where children’s labor was employed unless he pledged himself to oppose any extension of the laws restricting child labor. The common saying that the parents are the best people to take care of the interests of the children depends not only on the sort of people the parents are, but on whether they are well enough off to be able to afford to indulge their natural parental instinct. Only a small proportion of parents, and these not the poorest, will deliberately bring up their children to be thieves and prostitutes; but practically all parents will, and