Victorian Britain 697

many poor workers resided. Thereafter, parliamentary commissions began
to call upon experts to gather information and assess conditions of British
life. The age of statistics had arrived.
Regulatory agencies began to spring up. In 1848, Parliament created the
national General Board of Health. Chadwick’s revelations about public
health—or rather, the lack of it—encountered ferocious opposition from
those who were against any government intervention as a matter of principle.
“We prefer to take our chance on cholera and the rest than be bullied into
health,” groused The Times. Yet, by the time Chadwick was driven to resign
from the General Board of Health in 1854, the right of the state to intervene
in matters of health had been established. Parliamentary acts in the 1860s
extended regulations of working conditions in mines and in factories with
more than fifty employees and where women and children worked. The Pub­
lic Health Act of 1866 gave local government more authority to assure a
cleaner water supply. Five years later, state inspectors for the first time
obtained legal access to workplaces. Parliament soon established health
boards in towns and country districts, even if local business and political
interests often combined to foil the efforts of reformers. Yet, reform leagues,
such as the National Education League became part of British political life.
Victorious in elections following the passage of the Reform Act of 1867,
the Liberals ended the purchase of army commissions, enacted land reform
in Ireland, and the government recognized the legal existence of trade
unions. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1874, they, too,
sought to woo the allegiance of workers from the Liberals by getting Parlia­
ment to approve a number of reforms, including a law that forbade labor by

Street disinfectors in London, 1875.