Protective Legislation. The earliest protective labor laws were passed in Britain. By the mid 1830s, five laws, known as factory acts because they applied only to factories (all other workplaces were exempt), had been passed. They were largely prompted by humanistic concerns about the plight of poor children who worked in textile mills. Child labor existed before the mills, but when children began to work in these factories, they became publicly visible in a way they had not been before. Simultaneously, the bourgeoisie, whose political influence was increasing, was coming to see children as innocents who needed nurture and moral training, neither of which seemed to be available in factories. Middle-class reformers wrote eyewitness accounts of working-class life and urged the passage of legislation, limiting or eliminating the work of women and children and increasing the...