ABSTRACT
It is easier to understand the nature of the barrier which the class system can oppose to the spread of just and humane ideas if one views the circumstances first at a little distance and examines the present in the light of the past. One should read, for instance, about the conditions of Labour, and middle-class opinion on the subject, during the period of the Industrial Revolution. A most vivid picture is given in the books of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond: The Village Labourer, The Town Labourer (covering the period 1760–1832), and The Skilled Labourer. The new system had brought undreamed-of possibilities of heaping up wealth, but it was built on a ghastly exploitation of human lives. It was accepted, for instance, as the ordinary thing for the children of the poor to begin work at five or six years of age, to slave for fifteen hours in the depths of a mine or in the heat and dust of a cotton mill, in terror of the lash, or of the iron stick used by the overseers. It took forty years to overcome the strenuous opposition of employers and of the middle classes generally to get the worst of these evils a little abated.
