THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY.
MR. BEAUFOY, the newly elected Member for Kennington, tells an interviewer that he owes his return for that borough at least as much to his support of the Eight-Hours Day as to any other cause ; and we should not wonder at all if the reduction of the legal day became a question of importance at elections. Of all the semi- Socialist proposals now in the air, it is the one which could most easily be made into a popular cry. Many of those proposals are threatening only while unexamined. The demand for the special taxation of ground-rents, for instance, will not be earnest when it is seen that, like the exemption of poor houses from rates, it has very little meaning, as the taxation will in the end be recouped by an increase in rent. It will only be popular, moreover, so long as freeholders are few, and their number, already much greater than demagogues imagine, will increase with every measure for the enfranchisement of the soil. The abolition of taxation on working folk is impracticable so long as it is an object to repress drunken- ness ; and we are not much afraid in this country of the cry about the subdivision of the land. Liberty to toil in all weathers at the cultivation of potatoes on a patch of his own, is not the British workman's ideal paradise, or he would not slip away so steadily from the country-side, or prefer so constantly, when he saves money, to invest it in little houses. There may, however, be an outcry for the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour. Although the cry has not yet been sanctioned by the great Trade- :Unions, the men in each trade doubting, apparently, .whether it will suit them, just as Mr. Beaufoy doubts whether it would suit his business of making " British wines," the plan has much support from working orators, and still more from orators who wish to appear specially friendly to the cause of labour. It is perpetually being urged upon Parliament by men anxious to please large constituencies, as a condition to be inserted in all Govern- ment contracts ; and it is resisted, we note, more and more in a tone of half-apology. Mr. Morley spoke out against it at Newcastle in the manliest fashion ; but a good many prominent Members, Conservative as well as Liberal, treat it as one of those fads, like the resistance to the Vaccina- tion Laws and the oppressiveness of the police, about which it is inconvenient to be either truthful or distinct.
A reduction in hours is, moreover, the project among all others of that kind, for which there is in the abstract most to be said, and which, therefore, most attracts the philan- thropists of the closet. In the first place, it is already in one way embodied in our laws, the prohibition of labour on Sunday being enforced by legislation, and, although originally religious, being now defended mainly on the ground of the advantage, moral and physical, of securing to all some modicum of leisure. And nobody denies that if that modicum could be increased, it would be to the general advantage of the working class. Pessimists may doubt whether the mass of mankind are yet civilised enough to use leisure well, and whether there was not truth in our forefathers' maxims about Satan and idle hands ; but the ideal which Christians have in their minds of the future of the community, can never be reached while the majority are overworked, or until every man enjoys some reasonable quantity of leisure. We all approve education for the mature as well as the young, and the condition of education is time to learn. It is nonsense to tell all men to reflect, and study, and advance in culture, and then work them until they have neither the time for any of those improving occupations, nor the energy to use it if they had. It is hard enough for a bricklayer to cultivate himself while weighted with unavoidable fatigue ; but if he is to work steadily from 8 to 8, besides walking to his labour from his house and walking home again, it is practically impossible. Moreover, whether equality be desirable or not, or in accord with unalterable conditions or not, equality is the modern ideal ; and of the two grand causes of in- equality—the insecurity of the wage-earner and the over- work of the handicraftsman—the latter is the one which presents the fewer obstacles to alleviation. After all, unless work in itself be an evil, which is impossible unless we pro- nounce the Creator malicious, the difference between the lot of the workman and his employer is much of it only apparent. For a third of life, the time of sleep, they are exactly equal,—or rather, the workman, who knows .not of insomnia and its tortures, has much the best of it. In health there is little difference, for the grand advantage of the employer in that respect, skilled medical attendance, is shared, in London at least, by the workman also, and might be shared without Socialism much more com- pletely. Nobody malingers for the pleasure of swallowing medicine, nor will any woman bear more children because she is skilfully attended in her hour of pain. Family ties are the same enjoyment to both, food gratifies both alike, both have or may have the same enjoy- ment from society, and in the appreciation of rest, apart from sleep, the workman has a definite advantage. His grand disadvantages, in truth, are the insecurity which can never be amended till he is wise enough to apply the grand lever of insurance—lie formally rejected compulsory pensions for himself in Parliament on Wednesday—and the want of sufficient leisure. If that could be secured, the man of the majority—that is. the man with a steady livelihood from steady work which he thoroughly under- stands—would, considering what a world it is, that no food grows of itself, that none of us consent to our own existence, and that all are under sentence of capital punishment, have but little ground of reasonable complaint.
But can it ? We fear not, without such a redistribution of wages as would be felt by all workers to be a distinct step backwards, and such a reduction of freedom as the community has no right to compel. In many trades, piece- work is imperative, and piece-work and legal hours cannot exist together ; and in many more, the inequality of the length of the day has been decreed by powers independent even of the workman's vote. In the most important trade of all, agriculture, summer and winter cannot be made alike, and an eight-hour rule would simply mean that the seed should never be sown and the harvest never be reaped. The conditions of the building trade are nearly as severe, King Frost not being an elective monarch ; in the sailor's life necessities are immutable and rest forbidden, very often under capital penalties ; while in every trade, from soldiering to printing, there are days and hours of sharp emergency. A hard-and-fast rule agiinst overtime would be perforce disobeyed incessantly, to the ruin of respect for law and of workmen's confidence in each other ; and, of course, if overtime is allowed, the " Legal Day " becomes an empty phrase. No such law could be carried out, even if the whole world consented, and if the whole world could be trusted to play fair ; and till those events happen, it cannot even be recorded in a statute. For, after all, men must live, and the men of a country handicapped by such a law could not find the means of living. They would be undersold by the foreigner in wheat-growing, in mining, in shipbuilding, in every variety of occupation, except perhaps that of putting together foreign bricks, and foreign doors and windows. Three-fourths of all the trades would in ten years be in the position of the un- happy Cornwall miners after Australia and Banca began to pour out their treasures of copper and tin, men deprived of work, while willing to work and able to work, by the competition of a cheaper product. They might as well com- pete with slave labour, or convict labour, or fight matches with one hand tied, as contend against the world when themselves weighted with an Eight-Hour Law. Competi- tion is sharp enough as it is, and will be sharper yet, for the terrible competition of Asia is but just beginning, and only affects agricultural wages ; but with labour restricted by law, competition would be hopeless. We cannot see—and mind, we wish that toil could be reduced, at all events, to nine hours a day—where an answer to this argument can possibly be found, and rest our case upon that, without pressing another which is, to our minds, much more serious. We utterly deny the right of a community to establish slavery, even if the institution be necessary not only to its enjoyment, but to its existence ; and to limit the hours of adult labour is to employ an imaginary right of which slavery is the only logical out- come. The claim of John Smith to do innocent work as long as he pleases, and for the wages that con- tent him, is a right as inherent as his right to breathe, or live, and any deprivation of it by superior force is robbery with violence. Millions of John Smiths have no more moral right to take it away than two John Smiths, and if the sufferer resists the community as he would resist a footpad, he remains within his privileges as a mere human being. If the body of workmen, or the corporations called Trade-Unions have a right to take away that freedom, then a fortiori they have a right to forbid female labour, which directly competes with theirs and lowers all their wages ; yet, if we are not mistaken, Mr. Beaufoy and those who think with him are precisely the men who regard the prohibition of female labour—quite rightly, in our opinion —as a monstrous and immoral oppression of the larger half of the world.
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