canals and factories, manufacturing household goods, connecting telegraphs, distributing coal, formed the backbone of this dominant laissez faire model of commerce. Around the start of the 20th century, in Mogul Steamship Co Ltd v McGregor, Gow & Co, the House of Lords emphasised that businesses should be free to organise into trade associations in the same way that employees organised into unions. The consciousness of working people that they should have a role in the economy mirrored the development toward political participation. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845) Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1864) and the move from status to contract Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867) Workmen's Compensation Act 1897 Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897) Trade union decriminalisation Reform Act 1867 Master and Servant Act 1867 Report of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions (1868–1869) Parliamentary Papers vol xxxi Trade Union Congress (est 1868) Trade Union Act 1871 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1871 Cockburn Commission Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act 1875 Employers and Workmen Act 1875 Health and safety post 1867 The Sanitary Act of 1866, administered by local authorities, provided for general sanitation in any factories and workshops not under existing factory acts, and the Workshops Regulation Act of 1867, similarly to be administered by local authorities, amended in 1870, practically completed the application of the main principle of the factory acts to all places in which manual labour was exercised for gain in the making or finishing of articles or parts of articles for sale. A few specially dangerous or injurious trades brought under regulation in 1864 and 1867 (e.g. earthenware and lucifer match making, glass-making) ranked as "factories," although not using mechanical power, and for a time employment of less than fifty persons relegated certain work-places to the category of "workshops," but broadly the presence or absence of such motor power in aid of process was made and has remained the distinction between factories and workshops. The Factory Act of 1874, the last of the series before the great Consolidating Act of 1878, raised the minimum age of employment for children to ten years in textile factories. In most of the great inquiries into conditions of child labour the fact has come clearly to light, in regard to textile and non-textile trades alike, that parents as much as