Naturally the squires were not disposed to take this defeat lying down. They revenged themselves by taking up Lord Shaftesbury’s agitation for the Factory Acts, and shewing that the employer’s little finger was thicker than the country gentleman’s loins; that the condition of the factory employees was worse than that of the slaves on the American and West Indian plantations; that the worst cottages of the worst landlords had at least fresher air than the overcrowded slums of the manufacturing towns; that if the employers did not care whether their “hands” were Church of England or Methodist, neither did they care whether they were Methodists or Atheists, because they had no God but Mammon; that if they did not persecute politically it was only because the hands had no votes; that they persecuted industrially as hard as they could by imprisoning Trade Unionists; and that the personal and often kindly relations between the peasantry and the landlords, the training in good manners and decent housekeeping traditions learnt by the women in domestic service in the country houses, the kindnesses shewn to the old and sick on the great estates, were all lost in the squalor and misery, the brutality and blasphemy, the incestuous overcrowding, and the terrible dirt epidemics in the mining and factory populations where English life was what the employer’s greed had made it. All this, though quite true, was merely the pot again calling the kettle black; for the country gentlemen did not refuse the dividends made for them by the employers in the mines and factories, nor refuse to let factories and slums be built all over their estates in Lancashire; nor did the employers, when they had made fortunes, hesitate to buy country estates and “found families” to be brought up in the strictest county traditions, nor to disparage trade as vulgar when the generation that remembered what their grandfathers were had died out. But the quarrel between them explains how it was that when Parliament consisted exclusively of landlords and capitalist employers or their nominees, and the proletariat had no votes, yet the Factory Acts got passed. The Acts were the revenge of the squires for the Reform Act.