The early British factory system may be said to have been the most obvious feature of the Industrial Revolution. W.H. Hutt writes that there has been a general tendency to exaggerate the “evils” which characterized the factory system before the abandonment of laissez faire. Also, factory legislation was not essential to the ultimate disappearance of those “evils.” Conditions which modern standards would condemn were then common to the community as a whole, and legislation not only brought with it other disadvantages, not readily apparent in the complex changes of the time, but also served to obscure and hamper more natural and desirable remedies.

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“The eugenists pretend that they want to eliminate criminal individuals. But the qualification of a man as a criminal depends upon the prevailing laws of the country and varies with the change in social and political ideologies. John Huss, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were criminals from the point of view of the laws which their judges applied. When Stalin robbed the Russian State Bank of several million rubles, he committed a crime. Today it is an offense in Russia to disagree with Stalin. In Nazi Germany sexual intercourse between ‘Aryans’ and the members of an ‘inferior’ race was a crime. Whom do the eugenists want to eliminate, Brutus or Caesar? Both violated the laws of their country. If 18th-century eugenists had prevented alcohol addicts from generating children, their planning would have eliminated Beethoven.”