The literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the unstated assumptions of Puritan economics.

The poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable.

No one who reads the tracts of writers like Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this attitude.

Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it.

The tragedy is excused because the export-trade increases in its volume.