the Committee stage, and Fontenoy's mind was now full of the closest
calculations as to the voting on particular amendments.

For him the Bill fell into three parts. The first part, which was mainly
confined to small amendments and extensions of former Acts, would be
sharply criticised, but would probably pass without much change. The
second part contained the famous clause by which it became penal to
practise certain trades, such as tailoring, boot-finishing, and
shirt-making, in a man's or woman's own home--in the same place, that is
to say, as the worker uses for eating and sleeping. This clause, which
represented the climax of a long series of restrictions upon the right of
a man to stitch even his own life away, still more upon his right to
force his children or bribe his neighbour to a like waste of the nation's
force, was by now stirring the industrial mind of England far and wide.

And not the mind of England only. Ireland and Scotland, town and country,
talked of it, seethed with it. The new law, if it passed, was to be
tried, indeed, at first, in London only. But every provincial town and
every country district knew that, if it succeeded, there was not a corner
of the land that would not ultimately feel the yoke, or the deliverance,
of it Every workman's club, every trade-union meeting, every mechanics'
institute was ringing with it. Organised labour, dragged down at every
point--in London, at any rate--by the competition of the starving and
struggling crew of home-workers, clamoured for the Bill. The starving and
struggling crew themselves were partly voiceless, partly bewildered; now
drawn by the eloquence of their trade-union fellows to shout for the
revolution that threatened them, now surging tumultuously against it.

On this vital clause, in Fontenoy's belief, the Government would go down.
But if, by amazing good-fortune and good generalship, they should get