"The success of the slave trade agitation has obscured a great deal of the Sect's other social work. Active Christianity was the panacea for the world's ills; in consequence, education and missionary enterprise were more important to the Sect than the more direct ameliorations of social conditions, such as control of child labour, shorter working hours, cheap food, and higher wages. They and their supporters set up schools for the poor, especially Sunday Schools for ragged children, which were interested principally in the inculcation of morals and Christian principles, as narrowly interpreted by Simeon or Wilberforce. Not only the poor received their attention, but also the wealthy and middle classes, and, in spite of much aggressive opposition, prudish piety began slowly to replace that frank cynicism which had been the hall-mark of eighteenth-century fashion."
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Original Language: English
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J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950; 1964), pp. 159-160
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Georgian_era
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Georgian era
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