Many of Engels' lurid details and damning statistics come from official reports like Edwin Chadwick's "Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain", which was commissioned by a Whig government and published under a Tory one. Indeed, while Engels insists that the workers cannot hope for redress from a bourgeois-aristocratic Parliament, he can't help but note that "although the middle classes at the moment are the main - indeed the only - power in Parliament, nevertheless the last session (1844) was in effect a continuous debate on working-class conditions. All this suggests that fare from being obdurate, England's ruling class were taking action - slowly and as yet inadequately - to solve the problems caused by the industrial revolution. These problems were, it is useful to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing theories of economics and society.
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