Times," &e.)
THE "Goop EARL."
The Earl of Shaftesbury, known during a great part of his life as Lord Ashley.
one of the most active and devoted philanthropists this country has ever known. Born to rank and means which lit have secured for him every enjoy-sar to selfishness and left no eraving for personal ambition, Lord Ashley made his whole life a life of labour in the cause of those who most needed protection and help. He carried on the crusade against slave trade and slavery in all its branches which had been begun by Clarkson and Wilberforce during the former century and which, as to its main object, had found its triumph in this. But Akhley took up the work of Clarkson and Wilberforce in a new wav and carried the work into a new field. He aimed at the abolition of white as well as of black slavery. The manner in which women and children were overtasked in mines and factories filled him with the resolve that, if he could prevent it, no such crimes against humanity and civilisation should be longer endured in these islands. Ho awakened the public conscience to 2 knowledge and a feeling of the horrors which were enacted every day in our mines and factories,—horrors to which most of the observers who knew anything about them had grown too familiarized to wo1ider at, or to reflect upon, or to get the idea that they called for any remedy. Lord Shaftesbury often had a hard fight for it, for he had to contend against the theory, then becoming very dear even to men of the highest and purest aims, that legislation ought not to interfere between the employer and the employed. The chief reforms in our industrial life to which Lord Shaftesbury devoted himself were carried to triumph while he was yet living and his career established the principle, not likely to be lost sight of again in our legislative system, that the State has a right of intervention for the purpose of protecting those who have no power of protecting themselves.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.