This is simply not true. The UK parliament - at the time the most industrialised nation on Earth and possibly the country in which it started - was entirely stocked with land owners, all of whom would be working that land and reinvesting into it, along with many owners of factories. Owning land was a prerequisite to voting, let alone being an MP.

John Fielden[1][2], one of the most notable social reformers, especially for factory workers, was the owner of a mill:

> On his father’s death in 1811, Fielden and his brothers inherited the family cotton-spinning business at Todmorden, which became one of the greatest manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. Unlike most mill owners, Fielden soon became a supporter of legislation to protect factory labour.

So we can see that any them and us is a false dilemma and hence, not true. Not only that, even with opposition from "most mill owners", reforms still went through (even though some MPs at times slowed it or watered down some of the reforms).

So, capitalists in a capitalist society did indeed do what no other societies had done before. As Fieldsen notes in his The Curse of the Factory System:

> Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory system: as improvements in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labour to be less for all ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade altogether

Human greed is not limited to capitalists, but the reforms were.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Fielden

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fielden

Edit: typo and, of course, formatting. Why can't we get an editor, dear HN?