In the ten years during which it regulated factory work, first
 in part, and then entirely, the official reports of the factory inspectors
 teem with complaints as to the impossibility of putting the Act into force.
 As the law of 1833 left it optional with the lords of capital during the
 15 hours, from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., to make every “young person,” and
 “every child” begin, break off, resume, or end his 12 or 8 hours at any
 moment they liked, and also permitted them to assign to different persons,
 different times for meals, these gentlemen soon discovered a new “system
 of relays,” by which the labour-horses were not changed at fixed stations,
 but were constantly re-harnessed at changing stations. We do not pause
 longer on the beauty of this system, as we shall have to return to it later.
 But this much is clear at the first glance: that this system annulled the
 whole Factory Act, not only in the spirit, but in the letter. How could
 factory inspectors, with this complex bookkeeping in respect to each individual
 child or young person, enforce the legally determined work-time and the
 granting of the legal mealtimes? In a great many of the factories, the
 old brutalities soon blossomed out again unpunished. In an interview with
 the Home Secretary (1844), the factory inspectors demonstrated the impossibility
 of any control p267under the newly invented relay system. [102] In the meantime, however, circumstances had greatly changed. The factory hands, especially since 1838, had made the Ten Hours’ Bill their economic,
 as they had made the Charter their political, election-cry. Some of the manufacturers, even, who had managed their factories in conformity with the Act of 1833, overwhelmed Parliament with memorials on the immoral competition
 of their false brethren whom greater impudence, or more fortunate local
 circumstances, enabled to break the law. Moreover, however much the individual
 manufacturer might give the rein to his old lust for gain, the spokesmen
 and political leaders of the manufacturing class ordered a change of front
 and of speech towards the workpeople. They had entered upon the contest
 for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and needed the workers to help them to
 victory. They promised therefore, not only a double-sized loaf of bread,
 but the enactment of the Ten Hours’ Bill in the Free-trade millennium.
 [103] Thus they still less dared to oppose a measure intended only to make the law of 1833 a reality. Threatened in their holiest
 interest, the rent of land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic indignation
 against the “nefarious practices” [104] of their foes.