The Defense of the Old Regime, 1815–48 477countryside were horrified by the suffering. Sir Walter
Scott wrote of his 1825 visit: “Their poverty has not
been exaggerated: it is on the extreme verge of human
misery.” Twenty years later, conditions were even
worse, and during the potato famine of 1845–48,
Ireland lost more than 25 percent of its population—
experiencing more than 1 million deaths and losing 1.5
million refugees in a population of 8 million. Starving
peasants ate their domestic pets.
Ireland needed a great defender, but the first parlia-
mentary champion of Ireland could not take his seat in
the House of Commons because British law excluded
Catholics from office. Daniel O’Connell was a Jesuit-
educated member of the Catholic gentry. He de-
manded the repeal of the Act of Union and the
treatment of Ireland “not as a subordinate province, but
... as a separate and distinct country.” Lawful repeal
was hardly likely. O’Connell could attract 100,000 peo-
ple to a rally, but the House of Commons stood against
him by 529–34. His experiences in the French Revolu-
tion, however, had convinced O’Connell of the horror
and futility of revolution, and he continued to work for
a parliamentary victory and reject violence.
Early nineteenth-century Britain was not yet a
model of liberal democracy. However, Parliament ac-
cepted some important reforms between 1832 and
1846. Members did not democratize Britain, displace
the governing elite, or encompass the radical agenda,
but they made Britain the liberal leader of Europe. The
reform of Parliament in 1832 illustrates the nature of
British liberal reform (see map 24.3). It had been dis-
cussed since the 1780s, but little had been achieved ex-
cept outlawing the sale of seats in the House of
Commons (1809). The Reform Bill of 1832, won by the
moderate liberals in a Whig government, enfranchised
the new business and industrial elite, expanding the
electorate from 2.1 percent of the population to 3.5
percent. The bill abolished “rotten boroughs” such as
Old Sarum, the ruins of a medieval town that had no
residents but still sent two members to Parliament. This
eliminated fifty-six constituencies whose 111 seats were
transferred to manufacturing towns such as Birmingham
and Manchester, neither of which had representation in
Parliament before 1832.
Liberal industrial reforms were modest in their
range, but they pioneered European regulatory legisla-
tion. A Factory Act of 1833 established a maximum
working day in textile mills for young children (nine
hours) and for teenagers (twelve hours, or seventy-two
hours per week) and planned for inspectors to enforce
these terms. The Factory Act of 1844 extended the reg-
ulatory principle to women working in the textile mills,
limiting their daily work to twelve hours and their Sat-
urday work to nine hours (a sixty-nine-hour week) and
added the requirement of protective screening around
machinery. Further regulatory legislation followed: a
Mines Act (1842) prohibited underground work for
boys under age ten and for all women; the Ten Hours
Act (1847) lowered the workday for women and
teenaged boys to ten hours (a fifty-nine-hour week)
without provisions for enforcement. These laws have
been controversial. Laissez-faire liberals opposed them,
arguing that the state had no right to interfere withMAP 24.3
The English Reform Bill of 1832SCOTLANDWALESCORNWALLSUSSEXWILT-
SHIRELANCASHIRELondonLeedsManchesterBirminghamSheffieldNorth
Sea0 50 100 Miles0 50 100 150 KilometersTowns Enfranchised
Counties losing 10 or more
seats in parliament