ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of politicians lauded competition, individual enterprise and local self-determination while decrying State aid, State interference and – horror of horrors – State control. Government was now, through the agency of its inspectors and commissioners, a regulator, co-ordinator and, within limits, director of business including Poor Law and prisons, factories and coal mines down to specifics such as alkali works, burial-grounds, anchors and cables, oyster fisheries and lime juice. From the 1830s, it was equipped with a formidable apparatus of fact finding: the Royal Commission of Enquiry. In 1869 Horace Mann, Registrar of the General Register Office, reported to the Royal Statistical Society on the cost and organisation of Britain's Civil Service. Government intervention was a necessary response to the problems of an industrialising society. The most radical interventionist measure of all was introduced by Russell's government in 1849 in the hope of stimulating capital investment in Irish land.
