tematic organization. The very intensity of the evils which the
English spirit produced led to a reaction by which that spirit, while
doubtless remaining the same at heart, took on a different form, and
manifested its energy in a new direction.

The modern industrial era, replacing domestic industry by collective
work carried out by "hands" in factories, began in the eighteenth
century. The era of social reform was delayed until the second quarter
of the nineteenth century. It has proceeded by four successively
progressive stages, each stage supplementing, rather than supplanting,
the stage that preceded it. In 1842 Sir Edwin Chadwick wrote an official
Report on the _Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great
Britain_, in which was clearly presented for the first time a vivid,
comprehensive, and authoritative picture of the incredibly filthy
conditions under which the English labouring classes lived. The times
were ripe for this Report. It attracted public attention, and exerted an
important influence. Its appearance marks the first stage of social
reform, which was mainly a sanitary effort to clear away the gross filth
from our cities, to look after the cleansing, lighting, and policing of
the streets, to create a drainage system, to improve dwellings, and in
these ways to combat disease and to lower the very high death-rate.

At an early stage, however, it began to be seen that this process of
sanitation, necessary as it had become, was far too crude and elementary
to achieve the ends sought. It was not enough to improve the streets, or
even to regulate the building of dwellings. It was clearly necessary to
regulate also the conditions of work of the people who lived in those
streets and dwellings. Thus it was that the scheme of factory
legislation was initiated. Rules were made as to the hours of labour,
more especially as regards women and children, for whom, moreover,
certain specially dangerous or unhealthy occupations were forbidden, and
an increasingly large number of avocations were brought under Government
inspection. This second stage of social reform encountered a much more
strenuous opposition than the first stage. The regulation of the order
and cleanliness of the streets was obviously necessary, and it had
indeed been more or less enforced even in medieval times;[2] but the
regulation of the conditions of work in the interests of the worker was
a more novel proceeding, and it appeared to clas