Sir Phillip Agnew's Sunday Observance Bill, the most rigorous piece of moral-and, ...

Sir Phillip Agnew's Sunday Observance Bill, the most rigorous piece of moral-and, indeed, class-legislation since the Long Parliament, supported by 128 members of the Commons, with Lord Ashleyat their head, brought the two humorists of the age into the field together. Dickens riddled it in words; Cruikshank in pictures.

But in all Dickens's work there is a confusion of mind which reflects the perplexity of his time; equally ready to denounce on the grounds of humanity all who left things alone, and on the grounds of liberty all who tried to make them better.

England was shifting uneasily and convulsively from an old to a new discipline, and the early stages were painful.' To be numbered, to be visited, to be inspected, to be preached at, whether the visitors were furnished with a Poor Law Order or a religious mission, whether they came to feed the children or to save their souls, frayed tempers already on edge with mechanical toil, and hurt -often unreasonably, but still it hurt-that very sense of personal dignity on which the scientific reformers, as strongly as the sentimentalists, relied for the humanization of the poor. The one field in which they might have co-operated without reserve was the care of children.

The Factory Act of 1833 was incidentally an Education Act as well, though a very imperfect one, since for the purposes of the Act any cellar might be returned as a school and any decayed pedlar as a schoolmaster.