The ongoing consequences of the original Sadler report have continued to reverberate to this day.  The Sadler report, regardless of how flawed and biased it was, has been repeatedly used as the basis for justifying wage and hour laws both in England and in the United States.

It is the Sadler report that is used to justify prohibitions or outright prohibitions on the employment of children in the United States, England, and elsewhere.  Yet in the most significant particulars, the Sadler report is entirely incorrect, if not an utter fabrication.

Even Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, wrote in his 1884 essay Conditions of the Working Class in England that the Sadler report was "emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system for party ends.  Sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements, drawing from his witnesses by the very form of his questions, answers which contained the truth, but the truth in a perverted form."

Nonetheless, and even today, students who take advanced economic study in our major universities and colleges are required to read the Sadler report, with study or information regarding the contrary findings of the supplemental reports almost totally lacking, or given only the most cursory treatment.
 
More than a hundred and sixty years have passed since the Sadler investigations, and the ongoing damage to our understanding of economics and property is both monumental and staggering.

Consider this.  The public perception at large (encouraged by politicians and other demagogues) is to hate the industrialist and capitalist and to fear his "power". 

Yet it is the productivity of the industrialists that has changed the face of the world and has so much improved the life and lot of mankind that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Industrial Revolution is the single most significant development since mankind emerged from the jungles.

We are not trying to suggest that industrialists are inherently angels and sublimely motivated.  Human beings are by their nature, human, and there are men and women in all stations and walks of life who are good, bad, and indifferent in how they choose to treat their fellow man.

Industrialists and businessmen themselves are regrettably all too prone to run to government to solve their problems or to gain an advantage, just as do the supposedly altruistic champions of the employed (and unemployed) "masses".

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