at home. I have already mentioned the great redundancy of labour in 1859, due to the decline in the production of the goldfields, and an eight hours day could obviously do nothing to check that. Then Victoria has its own measure-one sometimes thinks a double measure of the unsettled class, the sundowners,' 'swagmen,' remittance men, ne'er-do-weels, who will work now for a season at sheepshearing or again for a season at the diggings, but are found most of the time wandering about the country from station to station looking for work, and generally preferring not to obtain it. An eight hours day is no remedy for this complaint. Then even in the ordinary occupations there seems to be in some ways more unsteadiness of employment in Victoria than at home, more changing of masters, and more time lost consequently between job and job. That was remarked upon by several of the witnesses before the Shops Commission. Mr. John Reynolds, for example, a working engineer, who emigrated to Victoria in 1870, said, 'There is a great difference in steadiness of employment here and at home. At home you may serve your time in a shop, and be in it till you are an old man. There is one case, perhaps, out of every hundred where that is the case.' That, he said, never occurred in Victoria, and he thought this irregularity of employment in the colony was so considerable that it kept wages down. The same circumstance is noted in a report issued by the Operatives' Board of Trade of Melbourne on the 15th of April, 1859, which complained that though wages in Victoria were nominally high, they were barely sufficient to maintain a man in the position held by his fellow-workmen in Great Britain, 'through the time he loses from one job to another looking for employment.' This peculiarity also. is one which an eight hours day has no charm against. Nor has it any charm against those great depressions which the whole world feels in common. The Australian Ironmonger for 1887 (p. 47) quotes a report of the Boilermakers' Society of England, stating that out of a total of 28,000 members, it had on an average 8,000 unemployed for the previous three years, and then mentions that there were then fifty boilermakers unemployed in Melbourne out of a total of 230. The proportion is smaller, but it is more striking when we reflect how much of the Australian work must be repairs, and it shows plainly enough that the great trade depressions make little difference between an eight-hour country and a ten-hour one. From these or other causes there is, as the American consul reports in 1884, almost every year an outcry about the unemployed in Melbourne in the dull season, notwithstanding that immigration

is now rather discouraged than otherwise; that the colony is virtually exempt from some of the most fertile causes of interruption of work elsewhere, for example, bad weather; and that it possesses in tolerable perfection the two correctives for the evil which are most confidently pressed upon us at home: (1st) access to the land and an active demand for agricultural labour, and (2nd) a constant supply of Government work undertaken to some extent with the very view of providing employment and preventing wages from falling.

There are very few available data as to the immediate effect of the reduction of hours in particular branches of trade in Melbourne upon the number of workmen employed in those branches, and the data which exist can support no definite conclusion. They show the most opposite results, and are of little value without a knowledge of the concurrent causes that have obviously conspired in their production. Brewing was a growing trade when the eight hours day was adopted by it in 1885, and it has gone on steadily increasing both its plant and its number of hands employed every year since; but if the increase of horsepower may be taken as an index of the general increase of plant, then in the year when it first shortened the day it increased its hands in a larger ratio than that of the increase of its plant. The breweries employed 2 men for every horse-power in 1884, and they employed 2 in 1886, and 2 in 1887 and 1888, but they employed as many as 2 in 1885. The coachmakers have gone on year by year increasing the number of hands employed since they adopted the short day, while the saddlers and bootmakers have gone on reducing it, and the agricultural implement makers reduced it the first two years after the change, but are recovering ground now. The tanners had thirty-eight fewer hands employed the year after the reduction of hours than they had the year before. Most of these figures will be given later on in connection with another part of the subject, and there is at least one conclusion of practical importance which they amply support. They show the utter folly of the assumption, so much pressed by the more ignorant advocates of an Eight Hours Bill, that the shortening of the day of labour has the necessary, certain, and uniform effect of abolishing the unemployed.

On the whole the reduction of the working day to eight hours has had no very sensible influence on the numbers of the unemployed in Victoria any more than on the rate of wages, and both these circumstances point to the conclusion, to which other and more direct evidence also conducts, that shortening the day has

exercised but very inconsiderable effect on the amount of the workmen's production. A shortening of hours has always two immediate effects-it improves the mettle of the masters, and it improves the mettle of the men. The masters set themselves at once to practise economies of various sorts, to make more efficient arrangements of the work, to introduce better machinery or to speed the old, to try the double shift and other expedients to maintain and even augment the production of their works. The men return to their toil in better heart after their ampler rest, reinvigorated both in nerve and muscle, and make up in the result sometimes in part, sometimes wholly, by the intensity of their labour for the loss of its duration. Victorian experience shows the recoupment almost complete.

There is an occasional tendency, apparently, to a diminution of the number of establishments in a trade after the shortening of the day, but none to the diminution of their gross produce. Probably some of the weaker employers-those with insufficient capital or inferior skill or old-fashioned plant-are forced by the change to go to the wall or to amalgamate with a more enterprising neighbour.

The brewers of Melbourne conceded the eight hours day in 1885; and some of them, as I am informed through private sources, had recourse within the following years to the doubleshift system, and acknowledged that while they had looked with great dread to the effects of the short hours before they were granted, they have found themselves now more prosperous than But the effect of the short hours in reducing the number of establishments and of the double shift in increasing the number of hands and of the whole change on the general production of the Victorian breweries may be gathered from the following table, taken from the official statistics of the colony:

ever.

These figures are for the whole of Victoria, and the eight hours. day may not have been introduced into provincial establishments at the same time as it was introduced in the town of Melbourne,

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and for that matter may not be introduced into them even yet, but then Melbourne contains half the people of the colony and much more than half the industry.

The saddlers also adopted the eight hours day in 1885, and in their case likewise there is a diminution in the number of establishments and an increase in their produce, but at the same time, curiously enough, a decided decline in the number of hands employed.

The bootmakers, who also received the eight hours day in 1885, show a decline in the number of the establishments, a decline in the number of hands employed, and a slight but not immediate decline in the product.

The agricultural implement-makers obtained the eight hours

day in 1886, and in their case there followed an increase in the

1 When I speak of these trades as having obtained the short day in a particular year, I mean that they walked for the first time as an eight hours trade in the procession of that particular year on Demonstration Day, 21st April. They may have actually obtained the concession any time between that date and the same day the year before, but I have no means of stating the time more precisely.

number of the establishments and in the value of the general product, but a temporary diminution in the number of hands. employed.

The coachmakers introduced the eight hours day in 1883 or 1884 (I am unable to ascertain more exactly), and have gone on steadily ever since increasing the number of their establishments, the number of hands employed, the general amount of their product, and as is also the case in most of the other examples I have adduced, the amount of product per hand employed.

Of course, differences in the value of the product are not the same thing as differences in its amount, and the figures must be taken for what they are worth. Only I think they tend to support the conclusion that the shortening of the day to eight hours has not been followed by any corresponding loss of product, but rather whatever it be due to-by an increase of product, and even by an increase per hand employed. Much of that result flows, no doubt, from better management on the part of the employers and other general causes of progress, but much of it also undoubtedly arises from an improvement in the industrial efficiency of the artizans themselves, the direct effect of the leisure they have acquired.

It is almost a universal opinion in the colony that the men work harder now while they are at their work, and that they turn out work of a better quality than they did under the long-hour system. Mr. Hodgkinson, a public man of Victoria, said in his speech at the eight hours demonstration of 1873 that he had often watched men working in the Public Gardens, and that though left to themselves very much they worked as well as when under contractors, that the Government stroke was unknown among them, and that he was convinced they did more work now in the eight hours day than they did before in the ten. A very recent writer, Mr. Charles Fairfield, speaks of the 'go' which is conspicuous in some of the out-door trades of Victoria. The leisure enjoyed by colonial workmen, their brisk, cheerful,