Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/29

there may be a sufficient fencing in the position of a shaft or drum, or in the position of some other part, as mules underneath a shaft, which render access to the shaft impossible except by express and most reckless intention. After nine years' quiescence, the Inspectors stirred up Lord Palmerston to require an enforcement of the law; and Mr. Horner began to enforce, at a great rate, what he assumed to be the law. He did not perceive that if the law was of uncertain interpretation, he was imposing his own construction, and holding up the millowners to censure upon that construction; or that if, on the other hand, the law was clear and unquestionable, he was acting the part of police man, or informer, in a manner not only very expensive in comparison with the employment of police, but wholly fatal to his influence with the entire class of manufacturers on behalf of the factory workers. Since the resort to law has shown the inspectors how much less clear their ground of confidence is than they supposed, they have remarkably changed their tone. They assure the millowners, and all other listeners, that they were forced to enter upon their course,— just as they before told Lord Palmerston that the law compelled them to request his commands to enforce the law. The difference between Mr. Horner and the other Inspectors is this; that they, finding the interpretation of the law to be doubtful, and seeing that interpretation committed to the Court of Queen's Bench, have the modesty and moderation to pause in their course of "enforcement," while Mr. Horner presses his informations, and intimates to the world, in his Reports and otherwise, that the National Association of Millowners and Occupiers, whom he has compelled to organise themselves for the ascertainment of their rights and liabilities, are banded together to defy the law. The Secretary of State, who derives his information on the whole subject avowedly from Mr. Horner, spoke of the Association to those of its members who went to him, as a deputation, last spring, as "a combination to resist the law." We shall see hereafter what