thus brought into conflict with his zeal for social reform. A Commission, headed by Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, had investigated conditions in the mines and its proposals for reform included prohibitions on female and child labour underground. Hatherton found himself in the unusual and uncomfortable position of defending the status quo alongside Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, a Tory grandee hated in the mining areas of Northumberland and Durham. However, Hatherton claimed that conditions in the Midland coal mining areas were much better than in the north and portrayed the miners as an aristocracy of labour, with the child labourers as "apprentices". Partly through his intransigence, the age lower limit for boys to work underground was set at ten. On the other hand, Hatherton welcomed a ban on women working in the mines and defended against all attempts to dilute it. The Railway Mania of the 1840s saw Littleton trying to get to grips with the pace of modernisation. Early in 1845 he spoke at length in support of a petition from the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal Company, attacking predatory pricing by railways. A little later he encouraged people affected by railway development to group together in corporate bodies to defend their joint interests. and speaking in defence of the coastal trade in coal. The following year, however, he was showing a very positive attitude and was advocating a streamlined system for dealing with railway development. In fact, he had informed himself sufficiently to hazard the opinion that broad gauge was the future. Proposed changes to the Game Act 1831 also gave him a chance to advertise himself as a modern and improving landlord. He proposed removing hares from the status of game, so that tenants might eliminate them from their land and boasted of his near-extermination of hares and rabbits on his own estates: "he could scarcely exaggerate the satisfaction which had resulted from that course, both to himself and to his tenants." However, the Irish Question was again coming to dominated debate and it had never ceased to be one of Hatherton's major concerns. During the 1830s he had spoken often on Irish matters, steering a tortuous path. On the one hand he supported most of the causes of equality and social reform dear to Irish nationalists. In 1836, for example, we find him defending the suppression of Orange lodges and denouncing the poor