ABSTRACT
The age of individualism was emphatically the era of humanitarianism—it was the philanthropy of the day which, in the midst of the agitation for parliamentary reform, would not suffer the wrongs of the negroes to be forgotten. The earliest Factory Act belongs to an age when English statesmen had hardly heard of socialism. The strength of Oastler's appeal was public indignation at the physical sufferings brought, as it was believed, by the greed of manufacturers upon helpless infants. Lord Shaftesbury, however, was primarily neither a politician nor a theologian, but a religious humanitarian. As he believed, and, as his critics, to whatever school they belong, may well believe also, it was implicit faith in a definite religious creed which compelled him to devote his life to philanthropic labours. The abandonment of the Charter was a distinct step away from democratic Benthamism; an increased interest in trade unionism was a step in the direction of collectivism.
