Chapter V
The Regulation of the Hours of Labour¹

Sidney Webb

In 1844 Mr. Greville wrote in his diary: —

I never remember so much excitement as has been caused by Ashley's Ten Hours Bill, nor a more curious political state of things — such intermingling of parties, such a confusion of opposition. . . . John Russell voting for 'ten hours,' against all he professed last year, has filled the world with amazement. . . . The Opposition were divided — Palmerston and Lord John one way, Baring and Labouchere the other. It has been a very queer affair. Some voted, not knowing how they ought to vote, and following those they are accustomed to follow; many who voted against Government, afterwards said they believed they were wrong. Melbourne is all against Ashley; all the political economists, of course; Lord Spencer strong against him. Then Graham gave the greatest offence by taking up a word of the Examiner's last Sunday, and calling it a Jack Cade legislation; this stirring them to fury, and they flew upon him like tigers. . . . The whole thing is difficult and unpleasant.²

Since that date about fifty Acts of the nature of Factory Acts have been passed, and the world is richer by half a century of experience of the result of such legislation. Nevertheless, when next year, or the year after, Lord Ashley's successor in ' Jack Cade legislation,' whoever he may be, introduces the ' Eight Hours Bill,' which the rising Democratic tide is now making inevitable; it can easily be foreseen that the House of Commons of to-day will be little better prepared for the proposal than was the House of 1844. It may be safely 'predicted that the division will again be, to the unseen political Greville of the hour, ' a very queer affair.' ' The Opposition ' will, perhaps, once more be divided; Radicals like Mr. Labouchere may not improbably follow in the cautious footsteps of his uncle, but the world will be surprised to find some very sturdy politicians voting in favour of the Bill, even ' against all they professed ' some time ago. The Home Secretary will possibly not venture to repeat his predecessor's unhappy epithet, but some representative of the Liberty and Property Defence League will doubtless supply the omission, and it is quite certain that every political wire-puller will once again regard the whole thing as ' difficult and unpleasant.' And, to sum up, just as the Ten Hours Bill passed within three years of Mr. Greville's entry, so every politician knows in his heart of hearts that a reasonable Eight Hours Act will probably be one of the earliest fruits of the next general election.³

This incoherence of political opinion upon such an important social reform as an extension of the Factory Acts, is due rather to ignorance and misapprehension than to any class feeling or selfish interest. Burke's dictum, that the generality of people are fifty years behind in their politics, is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago, and almost as applicable to the members of a popularly elected legislature as it was to the ' King's friends.' We are now rolling in the trough of the great wave of laissez faire, which set out from Rousseau and Adam Smith, and submerged all intellectual landmarks two generations ago. These have since recovered from the flood, but the main body of dim unconscious principle and tradition which makes up the mind of the average Englishman is still waterlogged, and the shallow economic optimism of Bastiat has actually got into cheap editions. The ordinary member of Parliament prefers to ignore the Factory Acts, and continues to regard them as an exceptional and somewhat hazardous temporary expedient, just as he ignores the rapidly progressing municipalisation of industry, and the steadily increasing nationalisation, by taxation, of both rent and interest. His mind remains caught in the individualist thicket of the last century, and though the industrial revolution has compelled him from time to time widely to depart from his professed principles, he is still unconscious of the extent to which it has rendered his most cherished political beliefs a mere exploded superstition. As regards actual legislation and practical collectivist administration he has empirically led the world; in economic theory and political principle he, like the Bourbons, has usually learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

The scientific verdict on the results of Factory legislation is, however, clear enough. In 1844 Mr. Greville could assume, as a matter of course, that ' all the political economists ' were against Lord Ashley's proposals; to-day it may be asserted with confidence that there is no single economic professor or author who would desire their repeal. The whole series of restrictive legislation, consolidated in the 'Factory and Workshop Act, 1878,' has received the heartiest possible endorsement by statesmen and economists of every school. Jevons asserts that 'this Consolidation Act is one of the brightest achievements of legislation in this or any other country.⁴ The Duke of Argyll has summed up, in his Reign of Law, the general conclusion as regards this ' Jack Cade legislation.' ' No Government,' he says, writing in 1866, 'and no Minister has ever done a greater — perhaps, all things considered, none has ever done so great a service. It was altogether a new era in legislation — the adoption of a new principle — the establishment of a new idea.⁵ Those who fought Lord Ashley most bitterly made their recantations most unreservedly, and Sir James Graham, Mr. Roebuck, and Mr. Gladstone⁶ have borne public testimony to the utterly mistaken character of their opposition.

The late Professor Newmarch spoke for the political economists when, as President of the Economic Section of the British Association in 1861, after referring to the progress of Factory legislation, and the ' wholly successful ' issue of the limitation of hours by law, he said: ' It had consolidated society in this part of the island, swept away a great mass of festering and growing discontent, placed the prosperity of the district on a broad, solid, and safe basis, on the orderly, educated, contented labour of Lancashire, a security against foreign competition, a guarantee of power, and fund of undivided profits. These results had followed from the sagacious, persevering, and moral exertions of the advocates of the Ten Hours Bill.'⁷

Mr. Mundella, in the enthusiastic Preface which he wrote for the translation of Von Plener's English Factory Legislation in 1873, speaks for the enlightened manufacturers when he tells us that he does not ' conceal his agreement with the Duke of Argyll, that " progress in political science has been in nothing happier than in Factory legislation." '

Mr. Bright, indeed, remained unrepentant all his life, though even Cobden softened towards Lord Shaftesbury, and Cobden's biographer gives us his own view and the judgment of statesmen on the opposition to the principle of Factory legislation of these great apostles of Free Trade. Speaking of Cobden's preference for the latter panacea, Mr. John Morley, in words pregnant of import, asks:—

How are you to settle the mutual relations of capital and labour to one another? Abolition of restriction may be excellent in the sphere of commodities. Is it so clear that the same condition suffices for the commonwealth when the commodity to be settled is a man's labour? Or is it not palpably false and irrational to talk of labour as a commodity? In other words, can the relations between labour and capital be safely left to the unfettered play of individual competition? The answer of modern statesmanship is that unfettered individual competition is not a principle to which the regulation of industry may be entrusted. There may be conditions which it is in the highest degree desirable to impose on industry, and to which the public opinion of the industrial classes may be entirely favourable. Yet the assistance of law may be needed to give effect to this opinion, because — in the words of the great man who was now preparing the exposition of political economy that was to reign all through the next generation — only law can afford to every individual a guarantee that his competitors will pursue the same course as to hours of labour and so forth, without which he cannot safely adopt it himself.⁸

It will be said that Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts applied only to the labour of women and children, in the legal regulation of which most people are now agreed, whereas the agitation for an Eight Hours Bill aims at restricting the labour of adult men, hitherto unmentioned in Factory legislation. The assumption that the existing Factory Acts do not affect men's labour is, however, merely one of those conventional mental veils by which the Englishman loves to conceal from himself the full scope of his actions. It is equally true that the earliest Factory Act (1802) applied only to parish apprentices in cotton and woollen factories, and nothing was probably further from the minds of its supporters than its subsequent expansion into what Mr. John Morley approvingly calls ' a complete, minute, and voluminous code for the protection of labour.'⁹ Not until 1842 was any restriction placed on adult labour, and then only in the form of a prohibition of women working below ground in coal mines. In 1844 came an Act bringing adult women in textile factories the same protection as ' young persons.' The celebrated 'Ten Hours Bill' of 1847 still professed to limit its scope to women and young persons, but by definitely fixing their hours of commencing and quitting work, it was admittedly foreseen that it must have the indirect effect of similarly limiting the hours during which their associated male colleagues could be employed. It was, indeed, mainly on this ground that it was opposed by John Bright,¹⁰ and strenuously resisted by Sir Robert Peel's Government in 1844, under the circumstances described by Greville. The debate upon it in 1847 turned largely upon the admitted restrictions which it would virtually, though unavowedly, place upon adult male labour; and Lord Macaulay's great speech on this occasion deals almost entirely with this accusation, which he admits and justifies. The triumphant passage of the Bill into law, no less than the explicit recantation of its chief opponents, can be taken only as an admission that, upon sufficient cause shown, the actual regulation even of adult male labour is not beyond the sphere of legislative duty.

'In the thirty years that followed,' says Mr. John Morley, 'the principle has been extended with astonishing perseverance.'

The explicit regulation of adult male labour was under-taken in 1860, when (in addition to a wide extension of the Factory Acts) a stringent code of rules was enacted for mines and miners, not indeed directed towards their protection from overwork, but towards their protection from accidents. By this time little more objection was made in point of principle, though each successive restriction was denounced as ruinous to trade. The Act of 1864 was, indeed, deliberately so framed as to prevent the adult male pottery workers from pursuing their custom of working excessive hours four days a week, and spending the other two days in idleness.¹¹ The same Act made sanitary regulations applicable to all factories and workshops within its scope, and thus practically inaugurated the further development of the law which has taken place in the subsequent Acts, under which the adult male worker, no less than his wife, daughter, or youthful son, is in all factories, and some workshops, explicitly protected, whether he likes it or not, against. insanitary conditions of employment; against accidents from unfenced machinery or gearing, or from faulty grindstones; and against fraud or oppression by his employer. The Labour Code still bears abundant marks of its tentative and empirical origin, and still refrains from formally avowing any direct interference with the hours of adult male labour, but, as Fawcett complained in the debate on the 1873 Bill,¹² its effect in reducing the hours of all the workers in the works under its operation is undoubted; and in the textile and pottery industries, in particular, the hours of male labour are almost invariably exactly those prescribed by law. The work which remains for the legislator is the extension of this principle of the State regulation of labour to the industries as yet free from its beneficent protection, and the continuance, as far and as quickly as the public opinion of the wage-earners will support, of that legal diminution of the hours of labour which (as the President of the Economic Section of the British Association was already in 1861 able to report) has been found so 'wholly successful.'

The extension of the scope of the Acts is mainly needed in such crowded industrial agglomerations as part of East London, where the multiplicity of ' garret masters ' and small workshops utterly baffles the inspector. All large factories become easily known, but the smaller places, which are often the worst, are difficult of discovery.

At present the Factory Acts apply to — (1) textile industries employing steam or other mechanical power; (2) certain specified non-textile industries, whether power is used or not;¹³ (3) workshops employing women or children; (4) bake-houses; (5) workshops employing men only; (6) domestic industries regularly pursued at home (other than straw-plaiting, pillow-lace-making, and glove-making). But the last two classes are subject only to a very few of the restrictions of the Acts, and the inspection of bakehouses has been, since 1883, relegated to the local sanitary authorities, by whom it is usually neglected. These three classes are accordingly almost entirely unregistered, and are often practically free from any inspection or control. The result, in densely crowded industrial centres, has lately been forced upon the attention of the public by the revelations of the House of Lords' Committee on the ' Sweating System,' and, as regards bake-houses, by some very realistic descriptions of the unmentionable horrors among which is made the bread we eat. It is practically certain that further legislation will soon be initiated with a view to the enforcement of a genuine inspection of all these surviving ' Black Holes ' of industry. What is needed is forcibly described by Mr. Charles Booth,¹⁴ in a plan for the efficient registration of East London industries, which would have delighted the heart of Jeremy Bentham. He advocates

a double system of license — a license to be taken out by the owner of any premises used for manufacturing purposes, as well as one to be obtained by all manufacturing employers. . . . The object is simply to secure the execution of the law, by making the responsibilities under it definite and intelligible, and by facilitating inspection. I imagine that on the licenses would be clearly set forth (in simple language, and not solely by means of excerpts from Acts of Parliament) the responsibilities involved. These licenses would be obtainable on application at any post-office, and be renewed annually. . . . Counterfoils would be forwarded from the post-office to the factory department of the Home Office, and from these a complete directory of every employer and his place of work could be framed and revised annually. . . . The responsibility under the law as to sanitation would ultimately rest with the landlord; and as to overcrowding or illegal hours, with the employer. ... It is not, however, to the direct action of the law, backed by the imposition of fines, to which I should trust, so much as to the moral effect of inspection, publicity, and the open acknowledgment of responsibilities.

The further limitation of the hours of labour is a more difficult task, but it is one in favour of which there is a strongly growing feeling among the workers. The actual operation of Factory legislation varies, in this respect, very considerably. In textile factories and in the manufacture of earthenware, for instance, the hours of male labour appear to be regulated directly by those allowed for female labour. The large and well-organised trades in which skilled artisans are employed have now usually obtained a normal working week, varying from fifty to sixty hours, which coincides practically with that which public opinion has embodied in law for adult women-workers. In nearly all these trades, however, the benefit of this so-called ' Nine Hours Movement ' has been largely neutralised by the practice of working overtime, and the normal day has become little more than a method of computing time-wages, without restricting the period of work. Still less is there any practical limit to the hours worked by men in the smaller workshop industries, whilst the scandalously long days of railway, tramway, and omnibus employés are well known. Shop assistants, if 'young persons,' have now a nominal, but unenforced, maximum of seventy-four hours per week, but there is no limit to the labour exactable from adults. It is probable that quite half the working population of London, over fourteen years of age, work for more than twelve hours per day.

It is not, of course, suggested that a universal and compulsory restriction of the hours of labour to eight per day could possibly be brought about by any one Act of Parliament, or even merely by force of law at all. An obstinate misunderstanding of any inconvenient agitation is invariably one of the outer defences of the existing order. Those who oppose the 'Eight Hours Movement' on the ground of its impracticability are usually only taking an ungenerous advantage of the looseness of phrase and vagueness of hope which characterise all proletarian movements, and which do not, as a rule, prevent them from having a definite and practicable object. More generous critics seek to discover what is really meant by a popular agitation, endeavouring to put into reasonable form the necessarily fluid aspirations of the masses. It may be admitted that the hours of labour in any particular industry can only be adjusted by the negotiations of those concerned in that industry, and that any uniform law is impossible. The existing Factory Acts show us, however, how a comprehensive labour code may be so adjusted as successfully to deal with hundreds of the most diverse industries; and it does not appear in any way impossible for those employed in any particular occupation to obtain definite registration in law for the conditions of employment which they desire to ensure to themselves, their colleagues, and their successors. It is now recognised that all social organisation is the product of a long series of the actions and reactions on each other of opinion and law. In matters industrial, the factor of law was, after the dissolution of the mediaeval social synthesis, at first almost entirely neglected, with the result that, as one eminent economist tells us, ' we have been suffering for a century from an acute outbreak of individualism, unchecked by the old restraints, and invested with almost a religious sanction by a certain soulless school of writers.'¹⁵ The 'true inwardness' of the Eight Hours Movement is an assertion of the necessity of the legal recognition of the general social interest in every labour contract, quite as much for the sake of the influence upon public opinion of such legal recognition, as for the immediate social advantages sought.

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the advantages to be expected from a further diminution of the hours of labour, if this can be secured without social danger. The time has gone by when it can seriously be argued, as it was in the last generation, that increased leisure meant for the workman increased opportunity for drunkenness, vice, and crime. The desirability of work for its own sake. is now heard only as regards the West Indian ' Son of Ham,' or the colonial ' native ' whose wide lands are coveted by the insatiable energy of the Caucasian, spreading civilisation and wage-slavery all over the globe. As regards our own countrymen, at any rate, it is tacitly admitted that a ' redistribution of leisure ' is well worth striving for; that to spend the entire waking life in a factory is a kind of existence alike disagreeable and demoralising, and that the better side of life, the richest in individual self-realisation, and the most fertile in social improvement, only begins at the moment when the daily bread has already been ensured, and the bread-winner is able to turn with a free mind to those wider duties of self-culture, parentage, and citizenship, upon the due fulfilment of which social progress ultimately depends. Many thousands of workers still toil too long for even physical health; but the main plea for shorter hours has been raised to a higher plane. It is no longer merely contended that the worker cannot healthily fulfill his daily task; even where he can do so a true view of social requirements compels us now to claim for the ' lower class brutalised ' some opportunity for participation in that civilisation from which their hours of toil now usually relentlessly exclude them.

Popular opinion is, however, now running so strongly in favour of a general shortening of the hours of labour, that complicated social or physiological reasoning on the point is unnecessary. Every one professes to desire a reduction in working hours, but many persons seem to think that it will be good only if it comes through the efforts of the workers themselves, organised for industrial war.

We are nowadays all in favour of trade unions, and even those who formerly talked about their tyranny being worse than that of the ' Dey of Algiers,' apparently regard them as guardians of popular freedom in comparison with the successors of Lord Shaftesbury. But trade unions are efficacious in proportion as the workers are strong; and to recommend them as a panacea to the weak is like the repeated injunction to Mrs. Dombey ' to make an effort.' Complacent middle-class advisers forget that fewer than 10 per cent of the adult wage-workers of the country are represented in the annual Trade Union Congress, and that not 20 per cent belong to anything even professing to be a trade union, usually because no union exists in the occupations pursued by the remainder.

But even if universal Trade Unionism were feasible, its advocates do not realise that an ( eight hours day ' secured by its efforts would inevitably cost, as the nine hours day did, a long series of embittered strikes and trade disputes. Now, a strike is an industrial war, and those who glibly recommend, not one or two, but a long series of industrial wars, might well consider whether even an eight hours day is worth that cost of suffering and social inconvenience. There is, however, a ' more excellent way ' than war, even in industry; and just as the ' King's peace ' has superseded the rough struggle of the highway, it may be hoped that debates at Westminster or in the town council will replace the ' arguments ' of the pickets and the ' arbitration ' even of the ' Great Cardinal.' This is now, though few are aware of it, the ' orthodox ' economic view.

I see nothing, therefore (said Jevons in 1882, referring to the incipient agitation for an Eight Hours Bill), to forbid the State interfering in the matter, if it could be clearly shown that the existing customs are injurious to health, and that there is no other probable remedy. Neither principle, experience, nor precedent in other cases of legislation prevents us from contemplating the idea of State interference in such circumstances.¹⁶

The principal objection urged by those who desire an eight hours day, but oppose an Eight Hours Bill, is that the latter would weaken the spirit of self-reliance which distinguishes the English working man. But this is surely the most fanciful of theoretical objections. No evidence is adduced to prove that the self-reliance of working men has been diminished by the long series of Factory Bills already passed into law. No suggestion is made that women workers in trades which are under effective legal protection are less self-reliant than those who toil in the unregistered laundries of Notting Hill, or ' sweating dens ' of East London. The cotton operatives of Lancashire, both male and female, have been longer and more thoroughly subjected to the enervating influences of the legal limitation of their hours of labour than any other workers; it will be news, to those who know them, that they are less self-reliant than less effectively protected wage-slaves, or that they possess less sturdy independence than their unprotected forefathers of seventy years ago. The actual evidence is, in fact, to exactly the contrary effect. Mr. Mundella is the best possible witness on such a point, and his testimony is emphatic. Writing in 1893, he says:¹⁷

An argument which is freely advanced against the interference of the State with the relations of capital and labour, is that it tends to undermine the independence and self-reliance of the class which it seeks to protect, and teaches them to look to the State rather than to their own exertions to remedy evils requiring redress. My answer to this is that the factory operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire have made greater advances in self-reliance and independence during the past fifty years than any other class of English operatives. Building and benefit societies, co-operative associations, both for distribution and production, have taken their rise and flourish amongst them on a scale of magnitude unknown in any other part of the United Kingdom.

It may, moreover, be added that no class of wage-earners is better organised, and that their unions have become stronger since the Ten Hours Bill became law, and not weaker. The objection is, however, not merely contrary to fact; it has not even the flimsy warrant of theoretic validity. It is a survival from the time when ' the Government ' was an oligarchy practically free from popular control. When ' the Government ' is obviously something outside of, and distinct from, the people themselves, any boon obtained from it might conceivably have the effect of weakening the self-reliance of the recipients. But now that ' the Government ' is becoming more and more regarded merely as the executive and administrative committee of the people, it is difficult to see how their own gift to themselves can have any such result. A cricket club may be demoralised by being presented with a set of stumps by the Parliamentary candidate for the borough, but if these are bought out of the members' own subscriptions by the members' own elected committee, no member feels otherwise than strengthened in his self-reliance. The Cabinet and the House of Commons, not only are nothing but the executive committee of the people, but (what is in this connection more important) they are daily becoming more generally recognised as such. How the registration of a trade agreement by law, at the instance of the majority of the workers in the trade, could, under any circumstances, possibly weaken their self-reliance, or lessen their sturdy independence, even Mr. Bradlaugh was never able to explain.

It is also objected that it is not the business of Government to regulate the hours of labour. Those who make this objection have perhaps some absolute test by which they can determine what is, and what is not, the business of Government. The great writers on the subject have no such ready rule. Bentham had none but expediency — the very point at issue. John Stuart Mill, diligently seeking such a rule when writing On Liberty, could find nothing more definite than this general expediency, and, indeed, incidentally recognises the admissibility of legal restraints on the employment of adult labour.¹⁸

It may, indeed, be contended that the prevention of excessive hours of labour is one of the essential duties of Government in an advanced industrial community. Even on the ' glorified policeman ' theory of ' administrative nihilism,' it is universally admitted to be the primary duty of Government to prescribe the plane on which it will allow the 'struggle for existence' to be fought out. Of course, the ' fittest ' to survive under the given conditions will inevitably survive, but the Government does much to determine the conditions, and therefore to decide whether the ' fittest,' by the test of conflict, shall be also the ' best ' then and there possible. We have long ruled out of the conflict the appeal to brute force, thereby depriving the strong man of his 1 natural ' advantage over his weaker brother. We stop, as fast as we can, every development of fraud and chicanery, and so limit the ' natural ' right of the cunning to overreach their neighbours. Notwithstanding cries of 'caveat emptor' we prohibit the weapon of deceptive labels and trade-marks. In spite of John Bright's protest, we rule that adulteration is not a legally permissible form of competition. We forbid slavery: with Mill's consent, we even refuse to uphold a life-long contract of service. The whole history of Government is, indeed, one long series of definitions and limitations of the conditions of the struggle, in order to raise w the quality of the fittest who survive. This service can be performed only by Government. No individual competitor can lay down the rules for the combat. No individual can safely choose the higher plane, so long as his opponent is at liberty to fight on the lower. ' Gresham's Law,' according to which bad currency drives out good, applies throughout the industrial contest. The ' good ' employer is liable to be ousted by the bad, and, as is now explained, the honesty which is the best policy is merely just so much honesty as will not let you fall flagrantly out at elbows with your neighbours. If sixteen hours in the gas-lit basements of the London textile warehouses is the standard of the trade for growing lads, apparently not even a Samuel Morley could venture to work his staff shorter hours. No cotton factory will dare to work only eight hours while its rival works ten. No shop dare close while its competing neighbour remains open. It is for the people collectively to decide whether the industrial tournament shall be fought à l'outrance, or shall be merely a friendly emulation, not involving wounds, degradation, and death even for the vanquished. A hundred years ago the ' fittest ' to survive were sturdy Virginian slaves; sixty years ago they were the maimed, distorted, and diseased factory hands who paraded before Lord Ashley in Oldham and Blackburn; a generation ago they were the ' lower class brutalised ' of the great apostle of culture — what they will be a generation hence depends essentially upon the legal and social limitations which we to-day set to the ' ape and tiger ' of the ' natural ' man.

The case is not one of personal liberty in self-regarding acts. No one wishes to prevent a man from working as long as he pleases; the community merely claims the right to prevent him from selling his excessive labour in such a way as to cause other workers to be compelled to work as long as he does. No one is to be coerced for his own supposed advantage, but only for the sake of others, in cases where his pursuit of that advantage operates so as to limit the industrial freedom of his fellows. The principle of individual liberty, as Mill expressly points out, cannot legitimately be pleaded against the 'jurisdiction of society' sin such cases; the only question for discussion being, as he says, whether the proposed legislation will produce the effects desired.¹⁹

Both Liberal and Conservative statesmen agree that the amendment and the extension of the Factory Acts are urgently needed. Factory legislation has, indeed, never been a party matter, and, whilst the Tories passed the earlier Acts, it was a Whig Ministry which actually made the ' Ten Hours Bill ' law, and a Conservative Home Secretary who carried the great consolidating Act of 1878. No question of principle really remains at issue, and the important task of to-day is to clear up the misconceptions which hinder popular unanimity on the subject, and to devise means for the practical application of the admitted principles to the complicated circumstances of modern industrial life. What the situation, in fact, demands, is a definite measure for practical discussion.

With the view of meeting this want, a detailed and practicable 'Eight Hours Bill' was, in i 889, drafted by a committee of the Fabian Society, which was pronounced by high official and industrial authorities to be thoroughly 'workable.'²⁰

After preliminary clauses, the draft defined the normal day and week in all contracts for the hire of labour, where it is not otherwise specified, as being respectively eight and forty-eight hours' working time. Such a clause would have but little direct effect, as it would always be possible for either party to the contract to stipulate for longer hours, but it would be useful as expressing the collective judgment of the community as to what constitutes the limit of a ' fair day's work.' There can be no economic or juristic objection to a legal definition of the implied conditions which the law will import into a contract, and similar implications are already abundant in our legislation. Various American States, such as California, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, have, indeed, already made this clause law.

The draft Bill then proposed to enact that the hours of employment in all branches of the national or local civil administration shall, except in cases of emergency, be restricted to eight per day. There can be no doubt as to the ethical right or political power of the majority of the community to determine the conditions upon which their public servants shall be employed, and if the popular voice demands that the State should set a good example as an employer of labour, even at popular cost, this will be a sign of the quickening of the public conscience which no one need regret. That the Government should set some kind of example is an inevitable consequence of its existence as an employer of labour, and nothing but good can result from an improvement in the example which it sets.

The next two clauses provided for the limitation of hours of workers on railways and in mines, with proper exceptions and safeguards. Little question can arise among ordinary practical men as to these cases. The most ardent advocate of liberty will be impressed by the public danger involved in the present excessive hours of railway servants, and, as already mentioned, even so stern and unbending a politician as Mr. John Morley has given in his adhesion to this part of the ' Eight Hours Movement.' The public interest in the matter has, indeed, now been asserted in the Railways Regulation Act of 1895. Public opinion appears also strongly to favour the legal limitation of the hours of underground labour. At present youths of fourteen often work ten and twelve hours in the mine, and even the well-organised coal-miners proper have been unable appreciably to reduce their hours in the West of Scotland, in the South of England, and in Wales. They are nevertheless practically unanimous, everywhere but in Northumberland and Durham, in their desire for an ' eight hours day,' at whatever risk of loss of wage. Their representative national assembly has repeatedly voted in its favour. The Trade Union Congress every year adopts an Eight Hours Bill for miners with practical unanimity. A clause to this effect was actually proposed in Committee on the Coal Mines Regulation Bill as long ago as 1887, and a Miners' Eight Hours Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons in 1893. Legislation on the point is clearly near at hand.

Other clauses proposed to give to the County Council, or other suitable local authority, the power to make bye-laws — (1) regulating the employment of labour in connection with local monopolies of services of a public nature;

(2) providing for the universal registration of workshops, advocated by Mr. Charles Booth for special localities; and

(3) dealing with the sanitary condition of places where persons are employed for hire. This power to make bye-laws, subject, in all cases, to confirmation by a Cabinet Minister, and to revision, if necessary, by a court of law, is already widely used, and it affords a convenient method of dealing with the special circumstances and requirements of different localities.

The clause applying to industries generally was, however, of greater importance than those hitherto mentioned, and as the idea of ' trade option ' which it embodied was somewhat of a novelty, the draft clause is given in full:—

Where it is proved to the satisfaction of a Secretary of State that a majority of the persons employed throughout the United Kingdom in any one trade or occupation are in favour of the maximum hours of labour per week in that trade or occupation being fixed by law, or, if already so fixed, being altered by law, he may by order made under this part of the Act declare a maximum number of hours per day or per week for such trade or occupation, and after the expiration of three months from the date of publication of such order any person employed in contravention thereof shall be deemed to be employed in contravention of this Act, and the person so employing him or permitting him to be so employed shall be liable on conviction thereof to a fine not exceeding ten pounds for each such contravention.

A Secretary of State shall have power, in order to satisfy himself of the desire of the persons employed in any trade or occupation as aforesaid, to cause a public inquiry to be held in the principal district or districts in which such trade or occupation is carried on, or to cause a poll to be taken of the persons employed in such trade or occupation, or to take such other means as he may deem fit.

For the purpose of this section, persons employed in any trade or occupation shall be taken to mean all persons employed for hire, or actually performing labour, in any capacity in such trade or occupation, whether already subject to the provisions of the Factory and Workshop Act 1878, or of this Act, or not.

No order made in pursuance of this section shall declare a maximum number of hours of labour per week in excess of sixty or fewer than forty-five.

It shall be the duty of a Secretary of State to institute an inquiry, in such manner as he may deem fit, with a view to the consideration of the expediency of making an order under this part of the Act, in each of the following cases, viz.—

1. Whenever he shall have reason to believe that excessive hours of labour prevail in any trade or occupation
2. Whenever he shall be requested to do so by the committee or other executive body of any duly registered trades union, or, in the case of there being no duly registered trades union in the trade or occupation in respect of which the application is made, by the committee or other executive body of any trades council, trades union congress, or other association or federation of trades unions. Provided that a Secretary of State shall not, unless for some special reason approved by himself, institute any such inquiry within a period of twelve months from the date of the holding of any previous inquiry in respect of the same trade or occupation.

This clause would meet the cases dwelt upon by John Stuart Mill²¹ and Professor Henry Sidgwick,²² and specially instanced, as we have seen, by Mr. John Morley, where the adoption of shorter hours would manifestly be advantageous if it were adopted by all the persons concerned, but where the opposition or disloyalty of a minority nevertheless prevents the desire of the majority being carried into effect. In such a case, as Mill points out, 'What some did from choice, others would soon be obliged to do from necessity, and those who had chosen longer hours for the sake of increased wages would be forced in the end to work long hours for no greater wage than before.' It is on similar grounds that the legislation of most civilised countries continues to forbid the pursuit of the main processes of labour on the weekly day of rest, and it may surprise some individualist fanatics to learn that this immemorial restriction upon adult labour, which was effectively cited by Macaulay in his great speech on the Ten Hours Bill,²³ received the express support of John Stuart Mill, even at the moment when he was writing his plea for individual liberty.²⁴ In such cases the legal endorsement of the will of the majority is, indeed, the only means of protecting that majority from having to submit to the will of the minority. The law, as Mill saw, increases the aggregate freedom instead of diminishing it.

Under the proposed system of ' trade option,' a legal limitation of the hours of labour in any trade could not practically be put in force until after a thorough discussion of the question among all those engaged in that occupation; nor until a considerable majority were either decidedly in favour of the limitation, or quite willing to acquiesce in it. A further advantage would be that the boys, labourers, casual ' hands,' and other unorganised workers connected with each large industry, would share in the decision and benefit by the limitation, equally with the so-called ' aristocracy of labour.'

The 'Trade Option' Bill of the Fabian Society found a great deal of support, among workmen and legislators alike. The Trade Union Congress of 1892 (Glasgow) adopted the principle, but turned it inside out by voting that the law should apply to all trades except those which made a special demand to be exempted from it. This new proposal was called The Trade Exemption Scheme. The Fabian Society then appointed another Committee to draw up a Trade Exemption Bill, so as to meet the views of the Trade Union Congress. The Committee did the best it could, but had to report that the working of Trade Exemption would be too expensive, troublesome, and complicated to be practicable, and that both Option and Exemption were, in their naked simplicity, unsound in principle. A subsequent Committee proposed a new scheme, called Trade Inquiry, which stands as the most practical solution of the problem that has yet been propounded.

The difficulty to be overcome is that almost every industry requires a separate set of regulations, but, piece-meal legislation, dealing successively with every trade in the country, is utterly beyond the capacity of the House of Commons. There is only one way out of the dilemma; and that is to pass a general Act providing for piecemeal regulation. We must establish by law an administrative body whose business it shall be, without giving further trouble in Parliament, to draw up such regulations for each trade as shall secure to the workers in it the benefit of an eight hours working day. A practicable Eight Hour Bill must include the constitution of such a body — let us call it an Eight Hour Commission. Further, it must be capable of being put into operation promptly, and of being adapted to the requirements of all the various trades. And it must, of course, conform to the general principles of democratic legislation by making the welfare of the whole community paramount. Private interests and trade interests, whether advanced by Labour or Capital, must not be accommodated at the expense of national and international interests.

The Fabian Society accordingly proposes²⁵ that the Home Secretary (pending the creation of a Minister for Labour) should be compelled to hold an inquiry into the duration of the hours of labour in a trade or industry (a) when directed to do so by either House of Parliament; (b) when requested to do so by a County Council, a Town Council, a duly registered Trade Union of the trade, or a Trades Council where there is no union; {c) on a special report from an Inspector of Factories. For the purposes of such an inquiry the Home Secretary would be bound to appoint a Commission of three persons, one of them a Factory Inspector, and one a woman in the case of trades employing women. The inquiry would embrace all trades directly dependent on the one mainly in question. The Commission would have full powers to examine witnesses on oath, to compel the production of time-books and other documents relating to the hours of labour, and to inspect factories and workshops. In order to ascertain whether the workers in a trade were in favour of a reduction of their hours of labour, the Commission would have power to take a vote by ballot of the employees in the factories and workshops concerned; or it might proceed by holding public meetings, or by calling witnesses.

At the conclusion of the inquiry, the Commission would have to report (a) what appeared to be the prevalent opinion among the members of the trade or industry as to the reduction of their hours of labour by law; (b) the probable effect of such reduction on the trade or industry and the community; (c) what reduction of the hours of labour in the trade or industry was desirable, what should be the length of the working day and week, and what allowance should be made for emergencies, seasons, etc.; (d) whether the case was a suitable one to be dealt with by the local authorities of the districts affected by the trade or industry. The report, together with those parts of the evidence which were not confidential, would be printed and laid before Parliament.

Within three months after the presentation of the report, the Home Secretary would be bound either to report to Parliament his reasons for taking no action, or, if he determined to take action, to draw up an Order containing either (a) regulations prescribing the length of the working day and week, with such exceptions as he might deem advisable for emergencies, seasons, etc.; or (d) conferring upon County Councils and Town Councils in defined districts the power of regulating the hours of labour in the trade within limits specified in the Order. The Order, of either kind, would be laid before Parliament, and after the lapse of forty days would become law, unless the House before the expiration of that time presented an address to the Crown against the Order or any part thereof. No request to vary or revoke an Order, or for a second inquiry after an Order had been refused by the Home Secretary, would be admissible until the expiry of one year from the date of the Home Secretary's report to Parliament. The same process of inquiry by a Commission would have to precede any fresh decision by the Minister.²⁶

The local authorities specified in an Order of class (£), or any of them, would be permitted to combine together for the purposes of the Order. Before a bye-law adopted by a local authority for the regulation of the hours of labour in a trade became law, it would have to be submitted to the Home Secretary, in order that he might see that it complied with the terms of his Order. Before a local authority could vary such a bye-law, it would have to receive power to do so by a fresh Order.

Legislation of this kind may be deemed inexpedient, but no one can deny that it is quite practicable of execution, without appreciable danger from foreign competition, or any departure from principles or precedents already adopted. Depending automatically, as each step does, upon the support of a majority of the workers, no step could be made in advance of the public opinion which alone can make laws of this kind effective. All that is asked is that law should not too far lag behind opinion.

If convinced, however unwillingly, of the practicability of the reform, objectors often repeat the arguments used against every successive Factory Act, in saying that a shortening of the hours of labour will necessarily involve a diminution of wages, a fall in profits, a rise in prices, and the loss of the export trade. Each of these dire prophesies really contradicts all the others, but that does not usually prevent them from being promulgated simultaneously or alternatively by those hasty oracles who are ever ready to rush in where instructed political economists fear to tread.

The economic effects of a general limitation of the hours of labour are, it must be admitted, by no means simple; and members of Parliament may not unreasonably complain that those 'chaplains of the middle-class,' the University professors of political economy, have abandoned them to the Democratic wolf without any explicit teaching on the subject. Nor can the problem be safely decided offhand, as is the fashion of the casual objector, ignorant alike of Longe and Thornton's demolition of the ' wage-fund theory,' and of the paradoxical results of Ricardo's ' Law of Comparative Cost ' in international trade. The problem is not merely one of wages or of product, but also one of profits, interest, the rate of accumulation, price, the limitation of demand, and international values.

It is difficult to predict whether and to what extent the aggregate gross product of commodities and services would be lessened in quantity or quality by a general reduction of the hours of labour. So far as positive evidence goes, the presumption is against any such diminution. The successive reductions of the hours of labour which this century has witnessed, have been attended, after a very short interval, by a positive general increase in individual productivity. In many cases it has been found that the workers did more in ten hours than their predecessors in twelve. The effort to get more than a certain amount of work out of a man defeats itself. Even if an increase in quantity can be dragged out of that terrible 'last hour' immortalised by Senior and Marx, it is often at the expense of the quality of the whole. And the speed of work lessens as the day advances.

In other instances it has been found possible to increase the speed of the machinery as the working hours were lessened, and there can be little doubt that this would often follow a further reduction. Moreover, a reduction of hours to eight per day would enable one intermission for a meal to be dispensed with. An 'eight hours day' needs, for adults, only one break, and every employer knows the loss of time, slackening of speed, and weakening of energy which every break produces.

Nevertheless, it is probable that in many occupations a net falling off would occur in the quantity of product produced per day per head, not adequately compensated for by any improvement in quality. It is, indeed, possible that a small reduction in average productivity per head might take place throughout the whole community. But this would by no means imply any diminution of the aggregate product. The first effect of any such diminished productivity would be an increase in the number of workers. If the reduction of hours resulted in a diminution of the number of the 'unemployed,' who are obviously now maintained at the expense, one way or another, of the 'employed,' the aggregate product of the community might even be increased. And this, which on the whole appears to be the probable result, necessarily implies, for the reasons above stated, a positive increase in the aggregate productive power of the community. In the arithmetic of labour, as in that of the Customs, two from ten might leave, not eight or nine, but even eleven.

Nor can it be assumed, as a matter of course, that wages would fall.

When precisely the same argument was used against the Ten Hours Bill, Macaulay made a proper protest against any such hasty assumption.

I am surprised,' he said, ' when I hear men of eminent ability and knowledge lay down the proposition that a diminution of the time of labour must be followed by a diminution of the wages of labour, as a proposition universally true, as a proposition capable of being strictly demonstrated, as a proposition about which there can be no more doubt than about a theorem in Euclid.'²⁷

We know now that, in this particular case at any rate, Macaulay was right in his doubt. The hours of labour in textile factories have been successively reduced from about 90 to $56\frac{1}{2}$ per week, while the rate of wages has uniformly risen. Nor has the gain been made at the expense of other industries. Political economists are emphatic in their conclusion that ' the effect of the Factory Acts has been undoubtedly to raise the real wages of the working classes as a whole.'²⁸

The notion of the inevitability of a fall in wages on a diminution of the working day derives its force partly from the surviving superstition of a determinate ' wages fund,' incapable of increase, however many additional workers are taken on, and partly from the apparently obvious results of ' piece-work.' Where workers are paid by the hour or by the piece, a diminution of hours must, it seems at first sight, diminish their earnings. But every economist now knows, as Karl Marx first conclusively illustrated, that wages by the hour or by the piece in any particular trade and locality really follow the same course as contemporary wages by the day. The daily earnings of an average piece-worker tend to be identical with those of an equivalent worker for day wages, and the effect upon day wages generally is clear. Every employer admittedly expects to have to pay more in wages, and hence the bitter and persistent opposition of the spokesmen of this class to each successive restriction upon the hours of labour. If wages were really expected to fall in proportion to the shortening of hours, the employer would have but little motive in resisting the shortening; and no motive at all if he worked his labour in shifts.

It is, however, sometimes objected that this rise in wages would be counteracted by a diminution in demand for labour, due either to diminished production, or to a rise in price. We have seen that the assumption of an aggregate diminution of production is an illegitimate one, and that even an increase might conceivably be looked for. This fact of itself implies the maintenance of the aggregate ' demand.' As Cairnes points out, ' The total demand of a community would, under such circumstances, be represented by all the commodities and services there offered in exchange for other commodities and services; and these would also constitute the total supply in that community.'²⁹ And, as Cairnes expressly added with regard to a universal ' Nine Hours Movement,' ' Why should it affect the relations between commodities in general and money? ' Even granting, however, that some commodities might rise in price, the rise would, ex hypothesi merely equal the increased amount paid in wages, so that, in the worst possible case, the ' real wages ' of the whole wage-earning class could not be less than before. It is, however, almost certain that the necessary absorption of a large portion of the ' reserve arm of industry,' the unemployed and the partially employed, would so strengthen the power of labour in its negotiations with the employer, as to enable it to obtain even a rise in real wages by an ' Eight Hours Bill.' That this has been the result of previous Factory Acts is undoubted. If the wage-earners press for such a measure, and are willing to risk its effect on wages, it is, at any rate, not for any other class to resist them on this ground.

The effect upon prices of a general shortening of hours would be complex. If, indeed, the wages of labour entered equally for all commodities into the manufacturers' expenses of production, the result would be, as we shall see, in the nature of a ' general tax on profits,' and would not affect relative exchange -values or prices at all. This has been thoroughly worked out by the economists, and the reader may be referred to any manual on taxation³⁰ for a further elucidation of the results of such a tax. But a universal reduction of the hours of labour, so far as it resulted in increasing the expense of manufacturing at all, would be analogous to a tax on all commodities equal to the increased expense, or to a general rise in the cost of labour to that extent. McCulloch worked out this problem for us³¹ in a manner which still holds good. To equalise the expectation of profit, as Mill sums it up, the value of the commodity into which the cost of labour enters more than it does in others, must rise, and the corresponding alteration in relative demand probably implies a relative fall in the values of other commodities less affected by the change. There would be, as Mill points out, neither a general rise of values nor of prices, but a disturbance of both, some values rising and others falling.

It may equally be safely inferred that an alteration in the hours of labour would not necessarily affect the total exports. If some values were raised and exports checked, others would be lowered and exports encouraged. But even if the expenses of production of all commodities were raised, and with them their prices, it may be shown that the total exports would not be reduced. This apparent paradox depends on the conditions determining international values, which, first elucidated by Torrens and Ricardo, have been accepted and developed by (to name only English authorities) Mill, Cairnes, Jevons, Professor Sidgwick, and latterly by Professor C. F. Bastable, whose work on the subject should be consulted. Briefly summed up, the theory amounts to this, that international trade does not depend on the superiority of one country over another in relative expense of production, but upon the existence of differences between the relative advantage (or even disadvantage) possessed by either country in producing various classes of its own commodities. According to theory, ' England might import corn from Poland and pay for it in cloth, even though England had a decided advantage over Poland in the production of both the one and the other.'³² This paradoxical result actually happens in fact, and we find ourselves profitably exporting cotton goods to America, woollens to Australia, knives to Sweden, and copper kettles to New South Wales, although these could all be produced with less labour on the spot. During the Australian gold fever, Ireland actually sent butter to Victoria, and it would almost have paid for Melbourne to have got its washing done in London. They could produce all these things actually cheaper than we do, but as they can produce other commodities to even greater advantage, they prefer, in spite of hostile tariffs, to do so.

Hence the paradox, that our export trade does not depend on being able to produce more cheaply than our neighbours; and England to-day freely imports locomotives from Belgium, wooden frames from Germany, and ' notions ' from America, although these could all be produced, remembering the labour of carriage, with much less labour here. Bermuda supplies New York with the finest possible early potatoes, but actually imports from New York other potatoes for its own use rather than grow them. In each case these imports are paid for by the export of some commodity in which the advantage in production is greater. We weave our wheat on Rochdale looms, grind our meat on Sheffield stones, and hew our wool in Durham coal-pits, not necessarily because we can work these industries to greater advantage than our neighbours, or because we cannot produce the imported commodities, but because we can weave, grind, and mine to greater advantage than we can produce food. It is the English farmer, not the American cotton spinner, who is really competing with Lancashire.

If the cost of labour entered in equal proportion into the expense of production of all commodities, no shortening of hours or rise of wages would affect the relative advantage of one occupation over another, and, accordingly, this would also have no influence whatsoever on our international trade.

Any alteration in the export trade which the resulting disturbance of values would actually cause (owing merely to the varying extent to which different industries would be affected) would be merely an alteration in the proportion in which the aggregate of exports was made up. The total export trade could not thereby be .affected. This conclusion may be derided by the practical man, but it is, at any rate, the unanimous judgment of economists. What the practical man fears is a rise in general time wages, and to use the words of Cairnes, ' A rise or fall of wages in a country, so far forth as it is general, has no tendency to affect the course of foreign trade.'³³

Turning, however, to such considerations as the ordinary man prefers to any but his own economic reasoning, it may be contended that a gradual widespread shortening of the hours of labour would not be likely to affect our export trade — (1) because former similar reductions have not done so: the textile exports, especially, having enormously increased; (2) because, even now, the English cotton-spinner works fewer hours than his foreign competitors, and finds their competition keenest where their hours are shortest (as in Massachusetts), not where they are longest (as in Russia and India); (3) because it has been theoretically predicted and empirically proved that the reduction would not affect prices generally; and (4) because other countries are all rapidly increasing their factory legislation also. Moreover, in countless industries there can be no question of foreign competition. In the railway industry, and other internal transportation; in the building and engineering trades; in baking, butchering, the supply of milk, and various other commodities; in the theatrical and newspaper industries; in all the forms of artistic or personal service, and in innumerable other departments of the industrial army there need be no fear of foreign competitors.

Seeing that the cost of labour does not enter equally into the price of commodities, a general increase in that cost would, as we have seen, cause a ' disturbance of values,' raising some and lowering others. Hence, there may arise, in the cases where prices are raised {i.e. in trades using relatively little machinery and inexpensive raw material), a diminution in the demand for certain commodities, either for home consumption or for export. As the aggregate production or aggregate export trade need not fall off, this does not imply any net reduction in demand for commodities or for labour, but it does imply a shifting of that demand. In some cases the commodities which have become dearer will cease to be consumed, and the amount formerly expended on them will be devoted to other purchases. Some shifting of labour might therefore have to take place, but there is little reason to suppose that the diminution in any one occupation would at any time be more than the increased demand for labour, due to the shortening of hours.

In some instances, however, the trade might be absolutely extinguished. It is possible that several of the minor industries of the East End are absolutely dependent upon the fact that a low type of ' sweated ' and overworked labour is employed at starvation wages. It is possible that the commodities so produced would not be worth having at all unless at the low price made possible by this ' white slavery.' In such a case, the extinction of the industry is the social price to be paid for the improvement of these workers' condition. The cheapness of their product is the price of blood, and the Democracy may be trusted to want none of it. Our forefathers forewent slave -grown sugar, and the New Englanders gave up taxed tea, for ulterior social ends. We can at any rate do without farthing toys, or penny puzzles, if this is necessary to heal the spreading social ulcer of East End degradation.

But what, it may be asked, is to become of the workers employed in these wretched industries: will they not be worse off than before? In no wise. The notion that labourers depend for their employment on work being ' found ' for them is a widespread, but stupid, fallacy. The money hitherto spent on these blood-stained commodities, the capital hitherto employed in their production, and the labour devoted to their manufacture, would alike be transferred — mediately, if not immediately — to other industries. The necessity for increasing the staff in all industries, which a reduction of hours would probably involve, would at once enable these workers to be absorbed, possibly at higher wages, and certainly under better conditions, than they had hitherto enjoyed. Where, then, it may be asked, will the pecuniary loss due to a shortening of the hours of labour really fall? It cannot be admitted that any general loss will necessarily take place, but if such a diminution in the nation's annual production should actually occur, it would fall upon profits. The new Factory Act would have imposed a new restriction upon industry analogous to a general tax on profits, and such a tax cannot be shifted either upon the wage-earner or the consumer. Profits, in the ordinary sense, are made up of interest on capital, insurance against risk, and the wages of management. The two latter items would not be* affected, and the whole result would be seen in a diminution of interest on capital.

It is practically certain that a tendency to a reduction in the rate of interest on capital was one of the main economic results of the previous Factory Acts. The gradually increasing restrictions co-operated with the increased competition to reduce the ' thousands per cent ' which made the fortune of Lancashire to the normal rate of manufacturing profit now enjoyed. The nameless iniquities of the ' white slavery ' may be presumed to have been pecuniarily profitable to the factory slave-masters, and every restriction of them was, at any rate, denounced as a confiscation of a part of the capital invested in the mills. Even as late as I 844, as we have seen, Sir James Graham and the capitalist press were raising the cry of ' Jack Cade ' against Lord Shaftesbury. The rate of loan interest, being the measure of the marginal effectiveness of capital, tends to fall with every limitation or restriction which is placed upon the employment of capital. As one profitable sphere of employment after another is forbidden, whether the slave-trade, slave-breeding, lotteries, the keeping of gambling hells, or baby-farming, new openings must be found for the use of capital, or its effectiveness at the ' margin of utilisation ' inevitably falls, implying a corresponding fall in the normal rate of local interest. If any general economic loss has followed the present restrictions, this is where it has fallen. If any pecuniary loss is involved to the community in a further shortening of the hours of labour, it is the recipients of interest and dividends who are likely to have to bear it. The distribution of the nation's income will have been altered so that (for less work) the wage-earners receive as much as before, and the capitalists a reduced amount. All interest will be affected. A future Goschen might conceivably even thereby be enabled further to reduce the interest on Consols. A similar rise in the ' margin of cultivation ' of ' land,' especially mines, quarries, etc., may, at the same time, slightly diminish the aggregate ' rent ' of immovable capital, though this will almost certainly be masked by increasing urban developments.

Such a fall in the rate of interest would formerly have been thought inevitably to lead to a slackening in the rate of accumulation of capital, and so to a renewed rise of interest. No effective encroachment, in the view of the older economists, could possibly be made on the tribute of interest, as any diminution thereof automatically brought about a subsequent increase, either through slackened savings or investment abroad. This obsolete theory is, as usual, still current in the minds of ordinary men and of leader writers, but the economist himself knows it no more. Professor Marshall tells us³⁴ that most men would save as much if the rate of interest were lowered as they do now, and the uniform experience of the savings banks all over the world confirms this view. Professor Sidgwick, moreover, tells us that he is ' aware of no adequate empirical reason for supposing, with Mill, Cairnes, and others, that the rate of interest in England at the present day is very near the minimum point,'³⁵ below which it could not fall without causing a diminution of capital.

The question of a possible emigration of capital is more intricate, but it may be observed — (1) that the rate of loan interest in England is uniformly lower than elsewhere, and yet the emigration of capital which has hitherto taken place has been a mere overflow of surplus annual savings; (2) that quite nine-tenths in value of what is called capital is absolutely incapable of emigration; and (3) that other nations are increasing their factory legislation parallel with our own advance, so that the gap is not by any means widening. The notion of any important emigration of capital in consequence of an Eight Hours Bill appears, indeed, as chimerical as the same threat proved to be in the cases of the Ten Hours Bill and the general Nine Hours Movement.

To sum up the probable economic results, as far as they can be discerned, a general shortening of the hours of labour may slightly decrease the average productivity per worker, but will, by absorbing a part of the unemployed, probably increase the total production of the community; supply, and therefore demand, will, in the aggregate, not be diminished; no effect will be produced upon prices generally, but some variations up and down may take place in the prices of some particular commodities; some industries may, therefore, be diminished, whilst others are increased; some few products may no longer be worth producing once the labour employed is properly treated; wages generally are more likely to be raised than lowered, though it is possible that they may remain stationary, or even droop, in a few minor industries; the aggregate payment in wages will almost certainly be larger, and that for interest on capital smaller, than before; the total export trade will almost certainly not be affected, though it may be somewhat varied in its composition; and the main permanent results are likely to be a rise in ' real time wages ' and a fall in the normal rate of loan interest.

But even these economic consequences of a sudden and universal shortening of hours, whether by law or by trades union pressure, are not at all likely to ensue in any perceptible manner upon the gradual and impartial shortening which is all that is proposed. In industrial organisation any sudden change, however good, produces a serious dislocation, but almost any gradual change, however important, can be endured without social injury. Time is of the essence of the matter.

The political economist will, therefore, have little hesitation in following Newmarch and Jevons (not to mention Karl Marx) in thinking that the economic results of factory legislation are to the benefit of the wage-earning class. The philanthropists, and all those who now glibly repeat the formula that ' a better distribution ' of the annual income of England is urgently needed, must accordingly, so far as political economy is concerned, hasten to support an Eight Hours Bill.

The important economic consequence which is likely really to follow a gradual and partial shortening of the hours of labour is a steady and permanent rise in the labourers' standard of comfort. An absolute refusal to legislate on the point would threaten far more dangerous results. Such great disputes as those of the coal-miners in 1893, an d the engineers in 1897, produce ten times more industrial dislocation and loss of foreign trade than any reasonable legislation. The rapid growth of feeling in the northern industrial centres, together with the profound discontent of the London workmen, are making further concessions to ' Labour ' inevitable. Parliamentary candidates all over the country are bowing their necks unwillingly to the new yoke, and pledging themselves, with more or less mental reservation, to support an Eight Hours Bill. The great mass of the newly enfranchised 'Labour vote' is still suspicious of the two great political parties, and absolutely unresponsive to the ordinary party cries. The shortening of the hours of labour lies nearest to the heart of every urban labourer, and is rapidly being pushed to the front as his first demand from the legislature. Hitherto he has scarcely recognised his new power; former ' Labour leaders ' have often been wedded to narrow and purely political ideals: and the workman has accepted his politics ready-made. But new portents are visible in the electoral sky, and students of political meteorology among the industrial classes already begin to declare that the party which first takes up the Eight Hours Bill, besides effecting an unparalleled improvement in the social condition of the worker, will gain the urban Labour vote for half a generation.³⁶

Notes

1. Contemporary Review, December 1889↩
2. Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria, vol. ii. p. 236 (March 31, 1844). ↩
3. This deliberately sanguine prophecy came very near fulfilment. The coal-miners' Eight Hours Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons in 1893, but was abandoned after a rebuff in committee. In 1895 the Railways Regulation Act became law, under which the Board of Trade is empowered, whenever it considers the hours of labour of any railway servants too long, to require the railway company to prepare a new schedule of hours, to the satisfaction of the Board, under heavy penalties for non-compliance. Under this Act the hours of many thousands of adult male workers have been compulsorily shortened. ↩
4. The State in Relation to Labour, p. 52.' ↩
5. Reign of Law, ch. vii. p. 402. ↩
6. See Hodder's Life of Lord Shaftesbury, vol. ii. pp. 205, 206. ↩
7. Quoted in Hodder's Life of Lord Shaftesbury, vol. ii. p. 207. ↩
8. Morley's Life of Cobden (Chapman and Hall, 1881), vol. i. ch. xiii. p. 298. The reference is to John Stuart Mill; see infra, p. 15. (Italics added.) ↩
9. Life of Cobden, vol. i. ch. xiii. p. 303. ↩
10. Speeches, ch. x. p. 287. ↩
11. Von Plener's English Factory Legislation, pp. 59, 60. ↩
12. Speeches (Macmillan, 1873), p. 126; see also Jevons's The State in Relation to Labour, ch. iii. p. 64, and Von Plener's English Factory Legislation, p. 92, in confirmation. ↩
13. The manufacture of earthenware, lucifer matches, percussion caps, cartridges, paper, glass, tobacco; machinery, metal goods, india-rubber, and gutta-percha, if by mechanical power; paper-staining, fustian -cutting, letterpress printing, bookbinding; blast furnaces, copper mills, iron mills, and foundries; bleaching and dyeing works; flax scutch mills; hat works, rope-walks, lace warehouses, shipbuilding yards, quarries, pit banks, etc. ↩
14. Life and Labour in East London, p. 498. Williams and Norgate. 1889. ↩
15. Professor H. S. Foxwell, p. 249 of essay in The Claims of Labour. Edinburgh Co-operative Printing Co. 1886. ↩
16. The State in Relation to Labour, p. 65. ↩
17. Introduction to E. von Plcner's English Factory Legislation, p. viii. ↩
18. See pages 53 and 56 of 1878 edition. ↩
19. On Liberty, p. 56 (cheap edition, 1878); see also Jevons's The State in Relation to Labour, p. 65. ↩
20. An Eight Hours Bill, in the Form of an Amendment of the Factory Acts, (Fabian Tract, No. 9). ↩
21. Principles of Political Economy, last edition, 1865, book v. ch. xi. sec. 12. ↩
22. Political Economy, book iii. ch. ii. p. 422. 1883. ↩
23. Lord Macaulay s Speeches, p. 444. Longmans. 1854. ↩
24. Mill's Liberty, p. 53 (cheap edition). ↩
25. Eight Hours by Law: a Practicable Solution (Fabian Tract, No. 48). ↩
26. The object of the Inquiry procedure is to get a continuous process of legislation without perpetual application to Parliament. The method suggested is a development of the practice of regulation by Provisional Orders which forms so large a part of modern law-making. These orders come into operation either after being legalised by an Act of Parliament, or, without express Parliamentary confirmation, after being before both Houses for a given time and not being objected to either by resolution or address to the Crown. The Endowed Schools Acts, the Factory Acts, and the Local Government Act, 1888, contain specimens of the procedure. Under the Factory Act, the Home Secretary has discretionary power to prescribe by Order the hours between which persons engaged in various occupations are to work; to determine whether certain classes of workers are to be allowed to work at night; and to exclude certain industries altogether from the Act. ↩
27. Speeches, p. 448. ↩
28. Article on ' Wages,' by Prof. J. S. Nicholson, Ency. Brit. vol. xxiv. p. 311 (if ↩
29. Some Leading Principles of Political Economy, p. 27. Macmillan. 1874. ↩
30. See, for instance, Mill's Political Economy, book v. chap. iii. sec. 3. ↩
31. Principles of Political Economy, part iii. sec. iii. sec. 2; see Mill, book v, chap. iv. sec. 1. ↩
32. Mill, Political Economy, book iii. chap. xvii. sec. I. ↩
33. Some Leading Principles of Political Economy, p. 400. ↩
34. Economics of Industry. ↩
35. Principles of Political Economy, p. 291. ↩
36. A convenient summary of facts and arguments, with many references to British or foreign literature on the subject, will be found in the Eight Hours Day (London, 1891), by Sidney Webb and Harold Cox. The history of the movement is more precisely given in the History of Trade Unionism (London, 1894), and the economic position is more elaborately analysed in Industrial Democracy (London, 1898), which gives the references to the latest authorities. ↩