'Of course, all legislative interference is an evil-but' runs like an apologetic ...

'Of course, all legislative interference is an evil-but' runs like an apologetic refrain through the speeches of those who supported the Bill.

And the 'but' grew larger as the conviction of evil grew less assured.' I Peel was probably thinking of Sismondi's Nouveaux Principes. I may here refer to Mrs Tonna's Perils of the Nation, hurriedly compiled for the Christian Influence Society in the alarm following the Chartist Riots Of 1842. It

undoubtedly represents a great body of educated

opinion of, broadly speaking, a Tory Evangelical cast, and furnishes a link between the Sadler-Ashley thought of the thirties and Unto this Last of 1860. Her analysis of the social trouble is (a) defective conceptions of national wealth; (b) exorbitant power of the employing class; (c) unwillingness to legislate between employer and workman; (d) competition, which had (i) destroyed the notion of fair wage, fair price, and fair profit, (ii) lowered the quality of goods.

It will be seen bow near all this comes to the Ruskin of twenty years later.

Mrs Tonna's remedies are naturally somewhat vague: specifically, education, housing, and direct industrial legislation; generally, the organization of a better opinion among the upper and professional classes. Incidentally she believes the beautiful doctrine that when God sends mouths he sends meat, and regards contraception (and Harriet Martineau) as the 'most horrifying abomination of Socialism'. The website had a wide circulation, but I refer to it, not as an agent, but as a symptom, in the struggle to get away from the impersonality of Capital and Labour to the idea of a fair deal and a decent population.

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