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THE FACTORY CONTROVERSY.

their challenge. On these grounds, I declined to modify my article, preferring to publish it unaltered through some other channel. As the best means of meeting the mischief it denounces, I offer it to your Association, to be published as a pamphlet, or in any way which, in the judgment of your committee, may ensure the widest circulation for it. In my present state of health, it has been something of an effort to write this article; and if I had consulted my own ease, I should have let the matter alone altogether; but the struggle for the establishment of a good or bad principle in this vital case is so important, and the existence of your Association appears to me a social fact of such extraordinary significance, that I could not have been easy to let the occasion pass without an effort on my part, for no better reason than its occasioning me fatigue and many painful emotions.

I now see additional reason to believe that no effort on the side of sound principle can be unnecessary. What influence Mr. Oastler's "Letter" of commentary on the Special Report of your Association may have I know not; but the republication of the Factory Acts by "Thomas Tapping, Esq., Barrister-at-Law," with notes which he calls explanatory, but which to his readers appear to be rather something very different, seems to show that it was high time the passionate advocates of Meddling Legislation should be met by opponents of such legislation who are by position likely to be at once dispassionate and disinterested. What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested party, to write such