‘Experience had already shown how much could be done by the industry of children, and the advantages of early employing them in such branches of manufacture as they are capable to execute.’

(William Pitt in asking the House of Commons to reject Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill. Feb. 12, 1796.)

‘And to what would they be indebted for this gentlest of all revolutions? To what, but to economy? Which dreads no longer the multiplication of man, now that she has shown by what secure and unperishable means infant man, a drug at present so much worse than worthless, may be endowed with an indubitable and universal value.’

(Jeremy Bentham, 1798.)