Michael Thomas SadlerArticle Free Pass Michael Thomas Sadler,
(born Jan. 3, 1780, Snelston, Derbyshire, Eng.—died July 29,
1835, Belfast, Ulster, Ire.), radical politician, philanthropic
businessman, and leader of the factory reform movement in
England, who was a forerunner of the reformers from the working
class whose activities (from the late 1830s) became known as
Chartism. An importer of Irish linens in Leeds, Yorkshire,
Sadler served as a Tory member of the House of Commons in
1829–30 and again in 1831–32, and then, in December 1832, sought
a new parliamentary seat created for Leeds. Although he received
considerable working class support, he was defeated by the
historian Thomas Babington (later Baron) Macaulay, who had
criticized Sadler’s Law of Population (1830), a massive treatise
attacking the pessimistic theories of the economist-demographer
Thomas Robert Malthus. Sadler attracted the votes of the Leeds
labourers because he advocated government intervention to
regulate factory conditions in general