government factory bill was introduced by Fox Maule Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. Children in silk mills were not to work more than ten hours a day (but this was not backed up by any certification of age). Otherwise, the bill made no changes to age limits or hours of work, but repealed the education clauses of the 1833 Act, replacing them with literacy tests. After a transitional period, children who could not read the New Testament were not to be employed more than nine hours a day; children who could not read an easy reader to be published by the Home Secretary could not be employed. His political opponents mocked the thought of Lord John Russell turning his undoubted talents to the production of a reading primer, and it was soon announced that once the Bill went into committee it would be amended to restore the 1833 education clauses. The second reading of the bill was scheduled for 22 June, but in early June Russell announced that the bill had been abandoned for the session. Ashley denounces government complacency On 22 June, when the government intended to progress a bill on Irish tithes, Ashley forestalled them, moving the second reading of the factory bill. He complained of the evasive conduct of ministers and government apathy and complacency on factory reform. Peel (who normally, even in opposition, deprecated obstruction of government business by backbenchers) supported Ashley: he held very different views on the issue from Ashley, but the issue was important, contentious, and should not be evaded : "so long as ineffectual attempts at legislation remained on the table of the house, the excitement of the manufacturing districts would continue to be kept up" Ashley's motion was lost narrowly 111 to 119. Ashley later attacked the government and its complacency and connivance at the shortcomings in the current Factory Act identified by the government's own Factory Inspectors: Althorp's Act had claimed superiority over Ashley's Bill of 1833 because of its shorter working hours for children and its provision for education. Those provisions had been violated from the outset, and continued to be violated, and the government connived at those violations: "notwithstanding the urgent representations and remonstrances of their own inspectors, the Government had done nothing whatever to assist them in the discharge of their duties" Millowners sat on the bench and adjudicated in their own cases (because Althorp's