ABSTRACT
JOHN BRIGHT, a consistently violent opponent of all parliamentary factory/reform, on March 15, 1844, was forced to listen to Lord Ashley's long speech urging a ten-hour factory law. Rising from his seat, he began a harangue full of personal abuse of the preceding speaker, and proceeded to prove that the persecution of cotton manufacturers was unfair, since workers in other industries were in a much worse condition. l Three days later Sir Robert Peel indulged in the same kind of shaky logic. 2 He then described the excessive hours of work and the intolerable conditions suffered by women and children in the making of earthenware, block-printing, the metal trades, and finally in agriculture. When he concluded: "Is it right, then, to deal only with this one branch of industry, and leave others altogether untouched, in which it appears that female children work fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, or even as much as
I I eighteen hours a day?" and added: "If you are prepared to
legislate for them", his too dramatic presentation was greeted with "Hear!" instead of by the jeers he anticipated for a proposal to him so clearly ridiculous and impossible. His anger at this unexpected use of his. eloquence was not concealed.
