j:'*;:;:K;:5-'' 'li!:i;S!?v;i;. ii iPP;;l;;iil;i'il: i UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE GIFT OF MAY TREAT MORRISON IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER F MORRISON v.. EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK m». Jl?^m EIGHT HOUES FOE WOEK VY JOHN KAE, M.A. AUTHOR OF "contemporary SOCIALISM' IL n ti n MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 The Bight of Translation and Reproduction it Reserved I B 2 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. ally to spend their leisure in idleness or rioting at the alehouse, but Mr. Danby had cured them of these ill habits by giving every man an allotment of land. Young fo'jnd them each w-th his three acres and a cow, some V7ith as much as twenty acres and horses as well as tov/s,' hiii all making 'farMing their chief recreation, and transmuted into homekeeping, industrious and thriving men. He mentions one prodigy who was near 12 hours at the mine — from midnight till noon — and did with 4 hours sleep in order to have 6 or 7 to devote to his eight-acre farm, but from the general tone of the narrative this man's long hours at the mine must have been exceptional. They could not have left him " half the day " for rioting at the alehouse.^ Young's words seem more applicable to the short day indicated by Smith and Jars. The stated task may have taken some men longer to do than others, and this man, who allowed himself only 4 hours' sleep, very probably and naturally longest of all, but Young certainly gives the impression that it left most of the miners an abundance — at one time in his view a super- abundance — of spare time. The hours of farm labour at the same period were quite as easy. The Labour Commission has just re- ported that the horsemen on English farms at the present time very commonly do 11 or 12 hours of actual work, exclusive of meal-times, every week-day, and 4 or 5 besides on the Sunday, but the horsemen on ^ Young, Tour in North of England, ii. 262. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 3 English farms in last century seldom did more than 8 or 9. Writing in 1787, William Marshall, the agriculturist, while mentioning that the ploughmen of Norfolk some- times wrought as long as 10 hours a day, says that in most parts of the kingdom 8 hours a day was the ordi- nary custom for team labour.^ Indeed, in some counties the working hours were even shorter. In Bucks, for example, the ploughmen went out in the summer half-year — from Candlemas to Martinmas — at 7 in the morning, returning at 3 in the afternoon, and in the winter half-year they went out at 8 and returned at 3. They had also, of course, to attend to the feed- ing and cleaning of the horses at home.^ In Bedford- shire their day was from 6 in summer and from daylight in winter till 1 or 2 in the afternoon, with an interruption for a meal about 10, called beaver-time.^ In Warwickshire it was in summer from 6 till 2 or 7 till 3, and in winter about 6 hours. In Hampshire the rural labourers seldom reached their work in winter before 8 or 9, or even 9.30, in the morning, and quitted it about 3 in the afternoon, while in summer they would be generally met returning from work about 5, and the reason given for their easy hours by Vancouver, the writer of the Report to the Board of Agriculture upon that county, is that they had a great choice of occupa- ^ W. Marshall, Rural Econo7ny of Norfolk (London, 1787), i. 138. - James and Malcolm, Agriculture of Buckingham, 1794, p. 39. 3 Marshall, Review of Reports to Board of AgricxiUure for Midland department of England, p. 589. B 2 4 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. tion there, and could not be got to Avork longer at daywork on a farm than other labourers wrought at task -work in the forests, or at the salt-pans, or on the canals, or at the variety of jobs to be found at Ports- mouth. In Devonshire the men went out before 8 in the morning, and returned at noon, and then went out again at 2, and returned before 6, workinof about 8 hours a day. Indeed, they would often be seen on their way home, even in the summer, about 5.^ If Gervase Markham in his Farewell to Husbandry^ is describing the common practice, and not laying down a model merely, field work in the seven- teenth century occupied 7 or 8 hours without a break, beginning at 7 in the morning, and ending at 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Besides that, the servants had stable work in the morning, for which, inclusive of time for prayers he allows two hours ; they had to feed the horses at 4 and 8, prepare their fodder for next day, water them, and when not otherwise ensfajied in the evening, they might be mending shoes for themselves or the master's family, or picking apples oi candle rushes, or beating flax. These would seem to be rather devices to occupy spare time than part of their obligatory task ; and on the whole there seems little doubt that Hodge led a much easier life in the reign of Elizabeth than he leads now in the greater reign of Victoria. ^ Marshall, Rural Economy of West of England, i. 119. 2 Ed. 1668, p. 112. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 5 The Factories Commission of 1883 report the evidence of a very old man, a Nottingham frame-work knitter, who had worked 69 years at the stocking- frame, and said that when he first went to work in 1745 as a lad of ten, the knitters never wrought moi-e than 10 hours a day for 5 days in the week and always kept Saturday free for going into Nottingham with their work, or for gardening, or any other thing they had to do ; but then as he wore on in life they were obliged to work 12 hours a day, and of late years as many as even 14 or 15.^ In the old domestic industries, and indeed in all trades in which the workmen had command of their own time, it was the too common practice to work very long hours one-half the week and go hand -idle the other, the idleness necessitating the overwork and the overwork again necessitating the idleness. The craftsmen wrought and idled as they chose by fits and turns, and it was their habits that made Defoe say the English people were the most diligent lazy people on the face of the earth. The weavers, Arthur Young notices, used to keep hounds, and would break off from their looms at any moment at the first sound of a hunt ; and Sir E. Baines mentions that even in his time, in the early part of this century, the hand-loom weavers, in consequence of their irregular habit of working, which seems character- istic of industry in a state of nature everywhere, would seldom work more than 56 hours in the week. ' Report, p. 180. 6 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. Professor Thorold Rogers's acute inference of the prevalence of the eight-hours day among the English artisans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is well known Wages were smaller in winter than in summer because the day of labour was necessarily shorter, and Mr, Rogers was struck with the circum- stance that winter wages were paid for only two months in the year — December and January— and concluded that the ordinary day of labour for the other ten months of the year was not longer than could be wrought between daylight and dark in November and February, and therefore not longer than about 8 hours. He draws the same inference for a subsequent period from the fact — First, that such a large number of hours of overtime — as many some- times as 48 — were occasionally worked in the week, that it would be impossible to pack so many into a sinole week unless the normal hours were short ; and second, that overtime was paid at that rate per hour which the ordinary wages would amount to if the day consisted of 8 hours. Magistrates, it is true, by virtue of statutes of Elizabeth's reign, often fixed the hours of labour in their districts at 14 a day and even more, but these decrees, as Mr. Rogers informs us, were habitually ignored. In fact we can easily perceive that it would be practically impossible to enforce them if masters and servants were agreed on anything else, and they appear to have been treated as merely prescribing a maximum and leaving the I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 7 actual hours to settle themselves as they could by local custom. In 1684 the magistrates of Warwick- shire fixed the hours of labour at 14| a day between March and September, and from daylight to dark between September and March.^ But we have just seen that a century later than that the customary hours in Warwickshire were only 8 in summer and 6 in winter for the ordinary agricultural labourer, with no doubt something like an hour and a half more for men who had stable work to attend to. lu Kent about this same period the standard or nominal hours were 10, but the writer of the Agricultural Report for that county states that these nominal hours were never strictly observed in consequence of the easy ways of both masters and men ; in consequence, he says, " partly of the scarcity of workmen, who well know that if one master will not give them their hire for a short day another will, and partly of the inattention of masters and their bailiffs to the hours of working."^ England indeed seems to have been in former days, as she has again become in our own time, known among the nations for the moderation of her day of work. Fuller in his Church History makes the shorter hours and richer fare of this country the two gi-eat inducements that persuaded the Flemish weavers to come over and settle in England at the instance of ^ Rogers, Six Centuries of JVage.i, ii. 394. * Marshall, Agriculture of Southern England, p. 434. 8 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. Edward the Third. They should exchange their herrings and mouldy cheese for the beef and mutton of England, and they should no longer work, as they had been compelled to do by "the churles their masters," "more like horses than men, early up and late in bed, and all day hard work." Not very long after the period of the arrival of these Flemish immi- grants, Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King's Bench under Henry the Sixth, attributes even the existence of some of our free institutions to the fact that the common people of England enjoyed a greater measure of leisure than the common people of other countries. He was living in exile in France at the time he wrote the book in which he makes this remarkable observa- tion, and he says it would be impossible to establish such a thing as trial by jury in that country, because the French people were so fatigued with hard labour that " twelve honest men of the neighbourhood " could not be found who had sufficient mental energy left in them to discuss the rights and wrongs of an intricate case. The English owed their leisure very largely, he said, to their pastoral or mixed farming, which enabled them to " lead a life more spiritual and refined as did the patriarchs of old," but however it came it brought men better possession of their faculties and caiaacity for the arts of freedom. It would appear then, from many different sources of evidence, that in the old England before the industrial revolution, people were everywhere accustomed to 1 THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 9 season their toil with a due admixture of repose. It is the short day, after all, like liberty, that is ancient ; long hours, at least in this country, are but a modern and happily transitory innovation. Taking one day with another, our ancestors seem seldom to have exceeded the wise old rule of King Alfred the Great, and in some of the remaining unrevolutionised branches of industry it is common enough still to hear employers complain that no matter what the nominal hours of labour may be, their men never average niore than 8 hours a day of actual work. The very long work- ing day seems to have been really a gi-adual fruit of the factory system. Those who laid down expensive ma- chinery grudged seeing it stand a moment idle, and they lengthened the period of work first to 12 hours, as it was in Arkwright's time, and then to 13, 14, and sometimes 16 hours a day. They grudged even to pause for a meal. In Manchester at the time of the Reform Bill, the mills ran from 5 in the morning till 9 at night without any stoppage but an hour for dinner, and the hands had to breakfast as they best could while standing and attending the ma- chinery. In the old days of water-power the mill was often obliged to lie idle in seasons of drought, and the necessity of making up for the time thus lost afforded constant pretexts for temporary prolongations of the day of labour, which were then ajit to remain as the per- manent rule. Even yet we have industries where water-power works and steam-power works are con- 10 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. ducted almost side by side in the same town, and the regular hours are always longer in the water-power works than in the others. But the dominant cause of the prolongation was common to water-mills and steam- mills alike : it was the new and large expenditure on factory buildings and machinery — the increase of fixed capital — the determination to get as much out of the machinery as possible, and the belief which subsequent experience has refuted that, as a manufacturer said to Karl Marx, every ten minutes more they got their machinery to run meant another thousand a year in their pockets. In the same way long hours came into the mine with the steam-engine and the tramway towards the close of last century. Before that time the pits were of no great depth, and the coals were carried from face to bank on rude sledges, or even on the backs of women. But with the steam-engine men were able to go deeper for the coal and 3'et carry it up easily on the tramways (first laid in 1777), and between the extension of the improved appliances and the ever- increasing depth of the mines, which ever prolonged the time necessary for going to the face and coming from it, occasion was continually taken to lengthen the hours of work underground. The same influence seems to have operated even in agriculture, for, as we have seen, the county in which the hours of field labour were, at the end of last century, longer, and its pace faster than they yet were in the rest of England, was the county of Norfolk, which I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 11 had already undergone the transition to the more scientific, expensive, and (if I may use the word) capitalistic system of cultivation in modern use. In every case the day of labour seems to have lengthened as the application of capital in the industry increased. The consequence was that in many of the great staple trades the workpeople were driven for most part of the year out of every remnant of the sunshine. They spent their days in a strained lying position in the hot and foul air of a mine, or in a strained standing position in the equally hot and equally foul air of a mill ; they lost their old energy of habit and contracted various disfigurements, even of form, and, as Mr. R. Guest remarks in his History of tlie Cotton Manufacture, in less than a single lifetime the very tastes of the English workmen changed. Instead of their old manly sports of wrestling, quoits, football, and the longbow, they betook themselves to pigeon-fancying, canary-breeding, or tulip-gi'owing. They had neither time nor spirit left for anything better, though under an eight-hours system the old English tastes would probably revive again as they are now reviving in such a remarkable way among the workpeople of Victorili. But for the last sixty years we have been slowly learning the lesson that all this successive prolongation of working hours, which was near eating the heart out of the labouring manhood of England, was also, from the standpoint of the manufacturers' own interest, a grave pecuniary mistake. In their haste to be 12 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. repaid their expenditure on machinery, the manu- facturers were really wearing down the most precious machine they had got — their great machine mdre, as Blanqui called it — on which the success of all the rest depended. They found that with this flesh and blood machine an hour's more running in the day did not mean an hour's more product in the day, but that really, after a certain limit, an extra hour of repose has much higher productive value than an extra hour of work. The American manufacturer made a foolish as well as a heartless remark who pointed to his work- people playing about the fields, and said, " What a waste of God's sunshine ! " Even if God's sunshine were sent for no other purpose than turning a mill, it probably could not have been used to better ad- vantage even for turning a mill than in the way these people were at that moment engaged. A French manufactui*er once said to Guizot : " We used to say it was the last hour that gave us our profit, but we have now learnt it was the last hour that ate up our profit," and though we still hear much fright expressed about the competition of the pauper and long-hour labour of other countries, we are coming more and more to perceive that Mr. Mundella is probably right in saying it is really their long hours that save us from their competition, because their long hours impair the personal efficiency of their labour and the competition between the nations is growing every day more and more to be mainly a competition in personal efficiency. 1 THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 13 The question of questions therefore, in connection with any proposed further reduction of the hours of labour, is the question of the probable effect of the change on the personal efficiency of the workpeople. If short hours meant short product, they would mean short profits and short wages too ; and good wages are at present as essential to the improvement of most of the working class as more leisure ; but then shorter hours may not in reality mean shorter product, for they may so better the quality of labour that as much is done afterwards in the short day as was done before in the long. They have invariably had that result sooner or later hitherto ; and the pith of the eight-hours question is the question how far a new reduction of the day of labour may be reasonably expected to be attended with that result again. As some help towards a correct opinion on this important point, it will be useful to examine the recorded experience of previous reductions in the length of the working day, and mark the diversity of sources from which the compensating improvement in the labourer's personal efficiency that attended them accrued. If these resources remain largely unex- hausted, and if eight-hours experiments already prove that they may be successfully utilised to balance the loss of time, then there would seem no reason why history should not repeat itself on the present occasion. The first experience of a reduction of hours has always been very various. Some enterprising manu- facturers have generally made the experiment before 14 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. the restrictive law came into force and found it advan- tageous ; then, after the introduction of the law, while some reported favourably from the very beginning, the majority reported a decrease of product for the first few months, or the first year or two ; but eventually the favourable experience became general, either be- cause the shorter hours had time to tell on the vital and mental energies of the workmen, or because em- ployers had one after another discovered the secret, which some of them discovered at the outset, of making up for the diminution of work-hours by improved arrangements of the work. In cases of shortening the very long thirteen-hour day, the result was often a surprisingly large immediate increase, as an effect of the mere relief from physical exhaustion. The manag- ing partner of a Massachusetts cotton mill told the Labour Commissioner of that State, in 1883, that when he reduced the factory hours, fifteen years before, from 13 to 11, he found that with the same machinery the production of prints rose from 90,000 to 120,000 yards a week,^ and the Middlesex Company of Lowell, on making the still greater reduction from 13 hours to 10 hours 24 minutes in 1872, found that by increasing the speed of their machinery so as to make as many revolutions in the day as before, and replacing female labour by male to a very slight decree (3i- per cent.), their product increased by 290,117 pieces (or about £135,000 worth) in the 1 Report on Uniform Hours of Labour, p. Ii2. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 15 year, and the earnings of their workpeople by 57 per cent.^ But instances of so great an increase are rarely met with. What is very common on all occasions of hour- shortening, whether to the eleven-hour day, the ten- Viour, the nine-hour, or the eight-hour, is to obtain a slight increase, either immediately or after a six or twelve months' trial. In some workshops, but always few in number, there is reported on all occasions to have been a loss of product proportionate to the loss of time, but in the great majority there was either a slight diminution only or the same output as before, partly due in some cases to a resort to new mechanical arrange- ments, causing a certain increase in the cost of produc- tion. But on the whole the general impression left on every occasion alike is that, taking one shop with another, the average production has not suffered to any degree worthy of mention from the shortening of hours. The w^orld possesses now very abundant experience of shorter hours, and its experience has been entirely the same in England, in America, in France, in Holland, in Switzerland, and in Austria. The first great general reduction of hours was the reduction in the English textile trades by the Ten Hour's Act of 1847, and it was regarded, not merely by employers but by many even of its warmest promoters, with considerable trepidation as a leap in the dark. It is true that a whole generation before, the experiment ^ Massachusetts Labor Btireau Report, 1873. 16 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. of shortening hours on a very substantial scale had been tried with signal success by Robert Owen, the Socialist, in that great seed plot of fruitful social reforms, the famous cotton mills of New Lanark. He ran those mills 10|^ hours a day for the twelve years from 1816 to 1828. The hours there seem to have been 16 at one time, and to have been 12i about the date of his new semi-philanthropic partnership with Jeremy Bentham and William Allen in 1814. They were first reduced from 12J to llj, and then finally from Hi to 10^ in 1816. And what was the result ? One of Owen's old workpeople, John Alexander, said to the Factories Inquiries Commission, that to his surprise the quantity produced after the reduction of 1816 did not sensibly fall off from the quantity produced previously, and that this was due entirely to the greater personal exertions spontaneously elicited from the operatives, among whom a general increase of cheerfulness and alacrity was very observable at the time, though, he added, it was not so great as the similar increase that occurred when the hours had been on a former occasion reduced from 12| to 11|.^ He makes no mention of any improvement or speeding of machinery but attributes the whole result to the improvement in personal efficiency. Lanarkshire cannot stand the com- petition of Lancashire to-day though the hours are the same, but during those twelve years Owen successfully competed with all rivals, though he wrought two, three, 1 First Report, p. 96. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 17 or even four hours less in the day. He tells us himself that when he was in France in 1818, he was invited by the Due de la Rochefoucauld to visit and inspect a cotton- spinning factory the duke had erected on his estate, and he examined the whole administration of the business. " I found by this investigation," says Owen, " that I was manufacturing the same numbers or fine- ness of yarn or thread, but of much better quality, at the New Lanark establishment in Scotland at 4h hour spells with one break, has given it up after four months' trial because 4| hours' work on end was found too great a strain on many of the women. The stronger women said they did not mind the strain, and had earned more wages after the shortening of the hours, and the employers expressed themselves as satisfied with the experiment from their point of view, but they have gone back to the 56 J hours and two breaks.^ When the Scotch ironmoulders received the nine- hours day, Mr. J. M. Jack, the secretary of their associa- tion, says " as much work, if not more, was done in the 9 hours as was done in the 10." ^ The largest cisfar manufacturer in Hamilton, Ontario, reduced his hours a few years ago from 10 to 9, and, as is stated in the Report of the Canadian Labour Commission, he ^ Labour Cmnmission Report on Employment of Jf'omen, p. 136. 2 Ibid., p. 188. ' Labour Commission, Group A, Qn. 23522. 431690 38 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. suffered no diminution in consequence in the day's production.^ Mr. Chamberlain related an interesting experience of his own firm, in his admirable speech in the House on Mr. Leake's Mines (Eight Hours) Bill in March, 1892. " When I was in business " said he, " (I am speaking of twenty years ago), my firm was working under great pressure 12 hours a day. Shortly afterwards the Factory Acts were applied to Birmingham, and we reduced the hours to 10 a day. Some time later we voluntarily reduced the hours to 9 a day, after the ex- periment at Newcastle of a nine-hours day. We were working self-acting machinery. All the workmen had to do was to feed the machinery and see the fires were kept in order. In this case, if in any, the product should be directly proportioned to the number of hours worked. What is the fact? When we reduced the hours from 12 to 10, a reduction of 17 per cent., the reduction in the production was about 8 per cent., and when we again reduced the hours from 10 to 9, a reduction of 10 per cent., the reduction of produc- tion was 5 per cent." It will be observed that there was here apparently no speeding of the machinery nor any other change in the arrangements of the work, but that the whole difference is due to the increase in the personal efficiency of the workmen under the influence of the shorter hours. It will also be observed that the degree in which tliis personal imj^rovement is effective ^ Webb aud Cox, The Eight Hours Day, p. 55. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 39 did not decline with the successive reductions, but is quite as high, or rather a little higher proportionally in the second reduction than in the first. The hours of bookbinders were very irregular and often very protracted before 1867, but the Factory Act of that year introduced a most beneficial change. The normal hours of the trade were reduced from 60 to 54 a week, and publishers, authors, and printers had all learnt to be more jDrompt, early, and punctual with the delivery of their work, so that the bookbinding firms were able to spread their work better over the year ; and there was so much less time lost, that both male and female operatives, working by the piece at the old rates, earned more money on an average, many of them much more, than they ever earned before.^ One of the forewomen said that under the old long-hour system the women used to do hardly enough in the last hour of the day to pay for the gas, and when they worked overtime their earnings, after the first few weeks, would fall to the same amount tliey used to earn without overtime.- In the plain and fancy box-making business, Avhich is a season trade and used to be marked by great irregularities in the hours of labour, the Act of 1867 has had the same results. " Both employers and employed are satisfied with the Act ; the work is more regularly distributed throughout the year ; there has been more of it ; and there has been further a substantial advance 1 Factory Report for 1877, p. 27. 2 /j;V?., p. 14. 40 EIGHT HOUKS FOR WORK chap. in the earnings. One firm largely engaged in this manufacture informs me that in 1867, while working 13 and 14 hours a day, the earnings of their workpeople were on an average a shilling a week less than in 1876, when working under the restrictions of the Factory Act." In 1872, as we are told by Lord Brassey, Messrs. Ransome and Sims, of Ipswich, the well-known agri- cultural implement makers, who emj)loyed at the time 1,200 hands, reduced the hours of work in their establishment from 58| to 54 hours a week. " But," says Lord Brassey, " the men working the engineers' tools have so successfully striven to protect themselves against the risk of diminution of wages from the nine- hours movement when employed in doing piecework, that the power employed to work the tools has already been increased from 12 to 15 per cent. With regard to vice work, all of which is done by hand, the operators execute quite as much as in the previous long hours. In the blacksmiths' shop, where there is a great variety of work, the men are in every case making equally good wages on the old piece- work prices. The same remark applies to the iron- moulders." ^ Messrs. Watts and Manton, button manufacturers, Birmingham, reduced their hours in 1866 to 8f, from 8 AM. to 6 P.M., with an hour and a quarter off for meals, and Mr. Baker, factory inspector, reported in ^ Brassey, Work and Wages, p. 147. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 41 1870 that the results had been eminently satisfactory to that firm, who said that the habits of the workpeople had changed both at home and in the workshop, that they were more industrious and intelligent, and they added : " It is remarkable that while they work fewer hours they earn more money." " We have found," they said, " that longer hours mean listlessness and loss of power." ^ The shirtmakers of Londonderry work longer hours in winter than in summer; in winter from 8 A.M. to 7 P.M., and in summer from 8 to 6 ; but the factory inspector states in his report for 1869 (p. 226) that the Londonderry shirt manufacturers acknowledged that their hands did as much work and earned as high wages in the shorter day they worked in summer as in the longer day they worked in winter. Metal working- is a very different kind of occupation from shirtmaking ; yet the same or even better results have been experi- enced in it. Mr. Guest, a Sheffield cutler, informed the Children's Employment Commission of 1862, that he gave his men the Saturday half-holiday eighteen years before, stopping work at 1 o'clock on that day, and that he believed the amount of work done in the week, instead of being diminished by the loss of time, was increased through the rest which was given, and which he found his men spent rationally and well, many of them, for example, in their gardens. He added that the best proof of the profitableness of the half-holiday ^ Factory Inspector's Ileport, 1870, p. 44. 42 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. was that all the other large works in the town had adopted it.^ Similar results are reported from America. Messrs. Pratt and Co., rolling mill manufacturers, Buffalo, U.S.A., shortened their hours of work in 1876, on account of bad times, from 10 to 9, and found "that the same number of men jDerformed about as much work in 9 hours as they had done in 10, esjDecially in the short days of autumn and winter," and that "the reduction of hours produced a visible effect on the characters and habits of the eynploy^s." Mr. D. Bell, machinery and boiler maker in the same town, had run his works 9 hours in winter and 10 hours in summer ever since 1842, and as the residt of his forty years' experience, says he had never found shortening the day in winter to make any effect on the amount of production. In 1885, there were seventy-four success- ful strikes for shorter hours in the State of New York, chiefly in the building, iron, and tobacco trades. They wanted 8 hours and got 9, and the Bureau of Statistics of Labour of that State mentions in its report for the following year, that whereas the employers had calculated beforehand that these strikes, if successful, would force them to employ 1,003 more hands, and increase their pay-roll to correspond, they found on actual experience that shortening the hours had made no difference whatever. They employed no new hands ^ Appendix to Fourth Report of Children's Employment Commission ^ p. 50. I THE BALANCE SHEET OF SHORT HOURS 43 and paid nothing more in wages. The old staff merely did the same work in the shorter day, and earned the same wages.^ The cigar factory of M. Van Vrumingen, in Gouda, reduced its hours from 11^ to 9| in 1889, and produced more cigars in the years 1890 and 1891 than it ever produced before. Now all this story of the gradual abbreviation of the day of labour in the chief manufacturing countries of the world, showing, as it j^lainly does, how each suc- cessive reduction from 14 hours to 12, from 12 to 10, from 10 to 9, has always been met by unexpected resources contained in the mind and muscles of the labourers themselves, naturally suggests the question whether those resources may not again respond to a fresh reduction, and whether the best and most profit- able limit for the day of labour may not be fountl below the nine-hours line. Numbers of eight-hours experiments have now been made in a considerable variety of trades, and these we shall proceed to consider in the next chapter. ^ Report for 1886, p. 05 7. CHAPTER II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK The eight-hours day has not, so far as I am aware, been yet tried by direct experiment in any of the great textile industries in this country or even in Victoria. The linen lappers of Belfast work on an average 48 hours a week, the rule with some firms being 5G hours and with others only 45 1, but linen lapping — folding the cloth after it is woven — is more a depart- ment of warehouse than of factory business. Manu- facturers seem, however, to be approaching the eight- hours limit, as Mr. Mundella and others approached the nine-hours limit, by tentative experiments during slack seasons, and Mr. Prior, the factory inspector, mentioned in his evidence to the Labour Commission the case of one of the largest textile manufacturers in his district, who had reduced the working hours of his factory during the slack seasons and the winter- time to 49 J a week — two spells of 4| hours each five days of the week, and one 4i hour spell on Saturdays — and who announced that if he obtained liom that arrangement CHAP. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 45 the increased attention to work which he hoj^ed for, he would make the arrangement his permanent rule. The result of this experiment has not been made known ; but so long ago as 1844, Mr. Greg, a large cotton manufacturer, accidentally discovered that when his mills were running only four days a week in a slack season, his men often produced five days' quantity and earned five days' wages ; that is to say, in four days of 12 hoars each, or 48 hours a week, they did quite as much, in consequence of their longer rest, as they used to do in five days of 12 hours, or 60 hours a week.i This experience is not uncommon in many trades, and employers are frequently surprised to find the metisures they have taken for keeping down their stock defeated by the zeal of the workmen to keep up their wages. Mr. W. A. Darbishire, slate quarry owner in Wales, thinks as much can easily be done in 8 hours as in 10, because he always finds when he jDuts the quarry on short time dviring bad trade, and works five days in the week instead of six, the total production is never diminished, and is sometimes even increased ; and Mr. E. A. Yoang, Lord Penrhyn's agent, has had precisely similar experience in the quarries with which he is connected.^ Mr. Young attributes the whole of this result to the increase of zeal on the part of the men to prevent any diminution of their previous earnings, but the influence of the extra day's repose ^ Shaftesbury's Speeches, j). 118. "^ Labour Co^nmission Report, Grouj) A, Qu. 9077, 16788. 46 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. must not be overlooked. For many of these quarry- men earn no more than three shilHngs a day, and have therefore every inducement to increase their wages in ordinary times if they could do so by increase of zeal alone. But the phenomenon only occurs in seasons of short time, and seems to point to the con- clusion that the quarrymen are doing their maximum when working five days a week, and naturally do no more when working six. Shipwrights work 52 or 53 hours in summer and only 48 in winter, but both at Portsmouth and on the Clyde they are reported to do quite as much in the week in winter as in svmimer, in consequence, it is said, of the weather being colder.^ Boot-clicking — cutting the uppers of the boots out of the skin according to pattern — is entirely done by hand, a7id requires some planning so as to get the greatest number of pairs out of the material. It is therefore a much lighter occupation than any of those I have just mentioned, but the same thing happens in it. Mr. Green, secretary of the National Union of Boot Clickers, states that the clickers in the Jewish shops, which are open only five days a week, do as nmch in their week of 48 hours as the Christian clickers do in their week of 54 hours.^ In mining, eight hours or less was the old English standard for the working-day, and more than a third of the collieries of England have returned to that standard again. We have therefore much experience of the 1 Labour Commission Report, A, Qu. 21564, 24405. ^ Ibid. C, 15027-37. 11 THE EIGHT-HOUES DAY AT WORK 47 effect of a shortening of the day to that limit in this great industry. The hours in the South Yorkshire mines were reduced to 8 in 1858, and Mr. J. Normansell, secretary of the South Yorkshire Miners' Association, who was working in the mines at the time of the reduction, stated to the Committee on Mines in 1866, that more was got in that district in 8 hours than in many other districts where they wrought 12 and 14 hours,^ and that the men earned more in the 8 hours than they previously did in the 12, because under the long hours both the men and the overseers were careless and sluggish. " There appears to be more energy on the part of the men and more energy on the part of the stewards, and all concerned. For instance, if a break -down takes place in South Yorkshire there is the greatest pains taken by the manager to put it right at once, because he knows the men will stop at 2 o'clock. They appear to be more brisk, and to go about their work with a spirit that will spur them on all round." ^ In a later answer, he explained more fully the point about the break-down in the machinery. " Formerly there did not seem to be any one there that appeared to be the least anxious to get the repairs done in order that the work would go on. I have known cases where we have wasted an hour or two hours about such a thing before it has been made secure again. One consequence of reducing the hours of labour has 1 gu. 3067. - Qu. 30G8. 48 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. been that each and every one in the employment of the masters, that is to say deputies and so on, have used more exertion to get a break-down set to rights soon, so that the work might come out quicker. They used to say then, ' Oh, the miners will work it up by stopping 12 or 14 hours,' but when we came to only 8 hours then the exertion was greater, and the difference was made up. Every one seems to try to get out the work sooner, because the hours are short, and there is less sluggishness about it." ^ The Secretary of the Coalmasters' Association of South Yorkshire gave exactly the same account of the effect of the shorter hours to Mr. J. M. Ludlow in 1860, except that he attributed it largely to another cause, though one of a like nature. He stated that since the South Yorkshire collieries, within the preced- ing twelve months, introduced the eight-hours day, the production of some of the largest of them was greatly in excess of what it used to be when the men worked 12 and 13 hours a day, and the principal reason was that "the young and improvident as a general rule had two or three days' spending and drinking, what they called pleasure, during the early part of their ' pay ' (time of employment), because they knew they would have the opportunity of working all the hours God sends in the later part to fetch up lost time." ^ This result was not obtained, it is true, at all the collieries of the district. Mr. J. Chambers Thorncliffe 1 Qu. 3151. - Social Science Association Report on Trade Societies, p. 45. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 49 informed the Committee on Mines in 1866 that instead of getting anything like this increase of product from the reduction of hours, the output of his colliery was reduced in about the same proportion as the hours.^ Now on this it is necessary to make only a single remark. Of all the possible results of so great a reduction of the hours of labour, this reduction of the output in the same proportion as the hours is the least natural, and really constitutes in itself evidence that there was some defect in the external arrangements and management of that particular colliery which prevented the natural operation of the shorter hours on the work- ing energies of the men from having due course. It would really not be reasonable to attribute the reduction of output at the Thorncliffe colliery entirely to a shortening of hours which increased the output in the other collieries of the district. The true cause must have lain elsewhere, possibly in some inferiority in the machinery of haulage, for it is very generally admitted that hewers can do as good a day's work in 6 or 7 hours at the face as they can do in any longer stretch, though they may not be able to get it out for want of some better arrangements for winding. Lord Brassey mentions that although miners worked 1 2 hours a day in South Wales and only 7 in Northumberland, Sir George Elliot, M.P., found the cost of getting coals at Aberdare 25 per cent, higher than in Northumberland.- The quick stroke of the northern miner is proverbial, 1 Qu. 12083. •^ Work and Wages, p. 144. E 50 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. and when Mr. A. Macdonald, M.P., the miners' agent, told the Coal Commission that no miner could work more than 8 hours a day for 6 days a week, Sir George Elliot said, " If he works as men in Northum- berland and Durham work, I quite agree with you." ^ The quick stroke comes only with the shorter hours, and it produces better results at the day's end than the slow and intermittent stroke natural to the long day. Eight hours from bank to bank is the colliers' general ideal but the Durham hewers had their hours reduced in 1872 to 7 from bank to bank, and seem in 5f hours at the face to do very much the same day's work they did before 1872 in 6|. We cannot, indeed, get much accurate lisfht on the effect of this reduction from official returns, because the official returns give no very trustworthy sta- tistics of the number of men employed before 1872, and tell us the annual production per man without stating the number of days wrought. But Sir J. W. Pease has given us some figures of one of his own collieries which are not open to these defects, and which show us that the reduction of hours made no material difference on the output. The men took more days play for a few years after 1872, but when they wrought they turned out about as much in the day, for though the figure is slightly less, it ought to be remembered that the number of hands was slightly increased in 1872, in- dependently of the shorter hours, by certain require- 1 Report, Qu. 4652. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 51 ments of the Mining Regulation Act ; and this increase of hands would necessarily make the average indivi- dual production seem less. With that explanation, here are Sir J. W. Pease's figures. The men, for reasons of their own, chose in 1872 to work 14 days fewer in the year than they did in 1870 and 1871, but their average product per day when they wrought was 5"85 tons in 1870, 5*77 tons in 1871, and 5"70 tons in 1872.^ Mr. Lindsay Wood states the average for all Durham. In 1871 with hewers working 6| hours in the day and 9'2 days a fortnight, the output per man was 1,097 tons ; in 1872, with hewers work- ing 5f hours a day and 9'1 days a fortnight, the output was 1,016 tons." The system of hewing was the same. Machinery plays little or no part in that work, and the drill, which has come in during the last ten years and saves the hewer some twenty minutes time in the day, was not in use in 1872 at all. Indeed, so far as hewing is concerned, coal owners never seem to make any objection to the eight-hours day for underground labour; their difficulties all lie with the winding. Shorter hours have generally ne- cessitated some rearrangement and improvement of the winding system of the pit, and that has often been attended with considerable expense as well as trouble. Mr. J. Connel, representing the Fife coalowners, admits that the Fife miners do as much work now under their ^ Report of Committee on Coals of 1873, Qu. 4237. 2 Ihid., Qu. 3629. E 2 52 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. eight hours system as they did before under a ten-hours one, but says the owners were obhged to go to the expense of better haulage machinery.^ Mr. G. B, Forster men- tions that when two hours were taken off the day of mining labour in Northumberland in 1872 it made no odds to the output, but it became necessary to increase the powers of the pit to get out the coal that was hewn, and the cost of producing coal was increased by the engines, horses, and increased staff of hands needed for this purpose." And the eight-hours system was tried in a Monmouth mine and given up, not because the miners could not hew as much in the day as before, but because the owners could not keep the roads open,^ The difficulty always lies with the transport of the coal not with its production. In Durham the owners say the eight-hours system would make a second shift of boys necessary for the drawing, and that there are no boys to be had, while in the Midlands the usual excuse is that the present winding machinery is inadequate to the task that would be required from it under shorter hours, and some owners even venture to say it would be quite impossible to introduce better machinery. Impossible seems scarce the word to use of the improvability of modern technical appliances, and though many owners were obliged to introduce better machinery, little harm would probably be done, even to themselves, for there is reason to fea,r that Professor Muni'o is right in inferring ^ Labour Comviission, A, Qu. 13743-8. 2 Trade Depression Comrnissioii, Qu. 11691, ' Labour Co7nmission Report, A, Qu. 5362, II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 53 that the present drawing arrangements in many mines are deplorably defective. Improved machinery is thus no doubt often needed in any case, but however that may be, it seems to be undisputed that with adequate arrangements for the transport of the coals, the hewers will produce as much in 7 hours at the face as they have ever done in the longer day formerly in vogue. Similar observations have been made abroad. M. C. Grad states that, according to the President of the Corporation of Miners in Germany, miners there attain their maximum productivity with eight hours effective work, and that when temporary prolongations occur the product is only augmented to some extent for the first three or four weeks, and after that it begins to fall off till no more is got in 10 hours than was got before in 8.^ This statement receives some general corrobora- tion from the remark of Dr. Oldenberg in his article on the " Westphalian miners' movement " in the Jahrbuch fuT die Gesetzgeburg^ that it had been proved by im- portant experiments in tunnelling and mining labour that an eight-hour shift was more profitable than either a twelve-hour or a six-hour one, adding that it is inexplicable how eight-hour, ten-hour and twelve-hour shifts should exist in Saxony side by side in the same industry and compete against one another in the same market, if the longer shift had any advantage worth speaking of over the shorter. ^ Revue des deux Mondes, 1877, p. 132 2 N. F. xiv., 320. 54 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. It is true the recent experiment in the Government coal-mines of WestphaHa has not been completely successful. The miners' hours were reduced in 1889 from 10 and 11 to 8 at the coal-face, and the Beichs- anzeigcr reported in February, 1891, that the result was a falling off of 10 per cent, in the output. The output of coal per shift in 1888-89 was 1,072 tons, while in 1889-90 it fell to 919 tons. But then, had the fall been in proportion to the loss of time, the figures would have been 750 or 850 tons, and there is reason to think that some other circumstances have co-operated to produce the fall, for it is said that a further decline of 5 per cent, has taken place since 1890, and there has been no further reduction of hours to account for that decline. In the Cleveland iron mines the men send out more stone in the day now in their 8 hours under ground than they did formerly in their 12 hours, and this result is in no way due to the introduction of ma- chinery, for machines are not used in more than five mines out of the twenty-three, and the increase of pro- duction has occurred in all, whether machines are used or no. But the increase was not obtained without improvement in the drawing arrangements. The owners put in more horses and more waggons to ac- celerate the carrying, and this seems to have in some way also lessened the time the hewers required to spend in loading the waggons. The chief part of the result however has been no doubt due in these Cleveland 11 THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT AVORK 55 mines, as elsewhere, to greater personal exertion on the part of the miner himself. " He works very much harder than he used to do," says Mr. J. Toyn, who has himself wrought in these mines for thirty or forty years. " His working time in the face is seven hours, and he can certainly work better, brisker, and freer in the seven hours than he could before." ^ But Mr. Toyn attaches so much importance to the assistance rendered by the improved drawing arrangements, that he thinks any further reduction of hours would now probably reduce the output too — unless, he ought to have added, to complete his argument even from his own point of view, the draw- ing system could be again improved at the same time. However this may be, the shorter hours have at all events produced a more efficient worker. Mr. Toyn says he himself used formerly to be often off work altogether through exhaustion ; but though he works much harder now, he keeps always fitter to work hard again, and though the change compelled the owners to improve their methods of drawing, they do not complain of the cost, and have never suggested any return to longer hours. Engineering is one of the industries in which the economic superiority of the eight-hours '^ay of labour has been most decisively proved by experiments, made with men working by the day, and without any change whatever, either in the character or the speed of the machinery employed, or any other * Labour Commission, A, Qu. 1047, 1072. 56 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. cliange except tlic reduction and rearrangement of the hours of woi'k. Engineerins: is a trade in which beyond most trades overtime is systematically wrought at night, and good time is as systematically lost and wasted during the day. Overtime at night means naturally unpunctuality in the morning and dawdling in the afternoon. Nature takes its revenge in breaks of five minutes here and a quarter of an hour there all through the set time of work, and these interruj^tions spontaneously cease under arrangements of hours more in accordance with the arrangements of nature. Messrs. S. H. Johnson and Co., of Stratford, London, reduced the hours at their works some five years ago from 54 to 48 a week, paying their hands the same day wages as before, and they get more work out now than they got then, without any increase whatever in the cost of production. They made a wiser arrangement of hours. Instead of running from 6 to 5 with two breaks for meals, they now run from 8 to 5 with one break, and the result is threefold. First, the men have more energy for work in the morning, coming after breakfast instead of before it, so that while an hour's work in the morning was* formerly worth to their employers 50 per cent, less than an hour's work in the afternoon, there is no difference now. Then the men are saved one walk home and back again in the day, and that also econo- mises their energies, so that they are now, say Messrs. Jolinson, better men and better animals than they were 11 THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 57 before. Second, the men are more punctual in the morning and more unremitting in work during the day. In their first three months working of the eight- hours system only two cases occurred of men being behind time, and though this standard has not been completely sustained since then, the regularity of the attendance has been satisfactory to the firm, and it is enforced by a forfeiture of wages proportioned to the loss of time. Then, a quarter of an hour is saved by dispensing with breakfast hours, because that time Avas always lost formerly in getting ready for going away and getting ready for work after coming back- The third effect is perhajjs more remarkable ; its origin is at least less obvious. The firm say they have not only a more zealous, but a more intelligent body of men, and this growth in intell'gence under the influence of shorter hours is remarked in many other instances. Then to all this there must be added many incidental savings in gas and fire and the like, which need not be further considered at present, though they are not in themselves unimportant.^ The experiment of Messrs. William Allan and Co., of Sunderland, has attracted more attention than this of Messrs. Johnson, but its nature and results are precisely analogous. It was on the 1st January, 1892, that this firm (of which Mr. W. Allan, M.P., is head) reduced their hours from 53 to 48 a week — 8f hours ^ Hadfield and Gibbins, A Shorter IVorking Day, p. 134-140. 58 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. four days a week, 8J hours a fifth day, and 4| on Saturdays. The hands come at 7.30 after breakfast, and work two spells five days a week, and one on Saturday. On starting the eight-hours system, Mr. Allan proposed to his men that if they would mean- while consent to a reduction of 5 per cent, in their wages, he would after six months raise their wages again and pay up the arrears if he found the new system did not increase the cost of production or affect the output. At the end of the six months Mr. Allan found the output increased rather than diminished, and raised the wages again and paid up the arrears. Mr. Allan was himself surprised at the results he got. " Paradoxical as it may seem I get fidly more work out than formerly ; in fact I am surjDrised at how the work is going ahead, having believed, like so many employers, that there would be a corresponding de- crease in output."^ Mr, Harrison, his manager, was even more surprised to obtain this result in machine work as much as in hand work. " A certain quantity of work, he said, used to be turned out by each machine in a day's work under the nine-hour system. Incredible as it may seem to some, he states that the same amount of work is turned out by the same machine while worked for 8 hours only." The explanation he gave was simple : the men wasted less time and wrought with more energy.^ One of Mr. ^ Hadlield and Gibbins, p. 144. * Newcastle Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1892. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 59 Allan's chief inducements to try the system was the hope that it would reduce the irregular attendance of his men in the mornings, and in this it has proved entirely successful. Mr. Allan told the Labour Com- mission that under the former arrangement of hours, the morninof attendance was so irreoular, that the average time wrought in his works did not exceed 48 hours a week even then, and that the improvement is so great that he gets the same number of hours worked now. " Since instituting the 8 hours we have no sleepers whatever," and unlike Messrs. Johnson's workmen, Mr. Allan's were as punctual after twelve months as at the beginning of the experiment.^ The men are in better health, they do more work, and the cost of production has therefore been less.^ Messrs Short Brothers, shipbuilders, Sunderland, began the eight-hour system — or at least the 48 hours week — at the same time as their neighbours, Messrs. W. Allan and Co., and they have precisely the same story to tell. After eight weeks' trial they write Mr- Hadfield that they are already satisfied the new arrangement of hours will not increase the cost of production ; that they have every reason to believe their production will be more; that the week before they wrote their wages bill was higher than it had been any week during the previous year, showing that the men were working better and more regularly ; and » Qu. 6862, 6865. 2 Qu_ q^qq^ 60 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. that they had scarcely one absentee under the new arrangement, whereas under the old, 20 per cent. of their men lost the first quarter every morning.^ Then* men were mostly paid by the piece, Mr, Allan's by the day, but the effect of the new system was the same in both works. After five months' experience of it they wrote Mr. J. O'Neill in May : " We have very great pleasure to say it has more than met our expectations. We are now paying considerably more wages and consequently turning out more work. We are now satisfied it is to the interest of every employer in our trade, as well as to the interest of the workmen, to adopt the eight-hours day as arranged by us."^ It may be thought that employers would now hasten to adopt a system which has been proved by three such signally successful experiments to redound to their own advantage as well as the welfare of their men, but as yet only one or two engineering firms have done so, e.g. Mr, James Keith, who has found his men doing as much work as they did before, and Messrs. Mather and Piatt, of the SaKord Iron Works, whose experience has not yet been made known, and the examination of engin- eering employers before the Labour Commission gives no strong reason to hope for any spontaneous conces- sions from that quarter. Captain Noble, managing director of the great firm of Sir William Armstrong and Co., said that for his own part he had never considered ^ Hadfield and Gibbins, p. 145. ^ Labour Commission Report, A, Qu. 21204. n THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 61 the eight-hours question yet as really a practical question, and that when the Society of Amalgamated Engineers had shortly before approached the General Association of Master Engineers, offering to make a concession of wages if they were granted the eight hours, the Association of Master Engineers thought even that reasonable proposal too outrageous to receive a moment's attention. " We told them," says Captain Noble, " we could hardly consider that that was seriously meant, and in fact we refused to consider the question of eight hours." ^ This attitude of stiff and unreasoning irreconcilability does not seem the most rational of attitudes in the face of the exj)eriments that have been made, and we turn therefore with some interest to the evidence of a succeeding witness, Mr. A. E. Seaton, managing director of the Hull Shipbuilding and Engineering Co., who explains his reasons for disregarding these experiments. What are they ? They are seven. First, Mr. Allan has not done any- thing at all ; he has only imagined he has done some- thing, " Mr. Allan is a poet, and poets draw on their imagination." 2 Forsooth, and what then are Messrs. Johnson and Messrs. Short ? Are they also poets ? Second, Mr. Allan has only had six months' trial of the shorter hours, and you cannot tell the result of an experiment in engineering work in six months. But Messrs. Johnson have had years of experience, and Mr. Allan himself has since found the same results after 1 A, Qu. 25479. 2 ^^ Qu_ 25596, 62 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. twelve months as he had found after six. Third, making men breakfast before work will not answer, because many men cannot eat a meal immediately after rising, and many landladies will not rise and cook a meal so early, and the men will have to work longer on an empty stomach under the new arrangements than they did before under the old. But no objection on that score has been made by either employer or em- ployed in tlie three workswhere the thing has been actual- ly tried, and as the men have done more work, and yet at the same time enjoyed better health than they did before, this inconvenience from indolent landladies and from the caprices of individual appetite seems to have been practically nei;tralised. Fourth, even if Mr, Allan's story is true, it proves nothing but what every- body knows. " I think all Mr, Allan has proved is this, that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and otliers that he has to do with can do in eight hours what in the last few years they have been doing in nine, I could have told him that before he tried the experi- ment, because I know from our own books they abso- lutely do so. What he has proved is tliat by giving the men shorter hours and encouraging them in various ways, he has got them to work harder for him than they would for me." ^ If he has jDroved tliat he has proved everything that is in question, and one can only ask in wonder, if Mr. Allan got his men to work harder by shortening his hours and encouraging them in other » A, Qu. 25598. ri THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 63 ways, why should the same means not be successful in Mr. Seaton's hands ? Fifth, Mr. Allan has succeeded, because he has a small shop. Mr. Allan's shop is not quite so small. He employs between 800 and 400 men, quite sufficient for an experiment like that. Sixth, " I think Mr. Allan may have got an extraordinary special kind of men. ... I do not know, but I think it is probable." ^ It would have been better and more practical to have ascertained the facts* first, before pronouncing so cavalier a condemnation ; but in this case it really makes no odds in the world whether the men were picked men or were not picked men ; the important and decisive thing is that they were the same men, and that with the same machines and the same materials they produced more in the day under the eight-hours system than they did vmder the nine. The eight-hour workman is " an extraordinary special kind of man " as compared with the nine-hour workman. Seventh, " It stands to reason that .... as machinery in nine hours will turn out 12| per cent. more work than in eight hours the loss must be 11 per cent, in going from nine back to eight .... Nothing will convince me that a lathe in eight hours will do what it can do in nine, if it is properly worked on both occasions. And that is why I do not agree with Mr. Allan." That is the last and in the witness's own mind evidently the weightiest reason for rejecting the » A, Qu. 25602. 64 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. credibility of Mr. Allan's story, and one is relieved to find that it is only a very old acquaintance whose fallacy has been exposed hundreds and thousands of times by the evidence of hard fact. A machine will, of course, not do as much in 8 hours as in 9, if it is worked with equal perfection on both occasions — that is the merest of truisms ; but what experience has shown in Mr. Allan's case — and what experience has shown in thousands of other cases before his — is that the same man doing his best under a short-hour system will often turn out as much in the day and more from the same machine than he could when doing his best under a long-hour system. What Mr. Seaton thinks so in- credible is exactly what Mr. Allan's manager states explicitly to have been done ; the same amount of work was turned out by the same machine and the same men in 8 hours as was done before in 9. I shall discuss this subject more fully later on and show that the intervention of automatic machinery, so far from discounting the influence of personal efficiency, often enhances it to a remarkable degree, and never in any case neutralises it altogether. This and other truths of kindred simplicity seem often strangely hid from the wise and prudent, from the practical and experienced heads of the world of labour, to whom we naturally look up as the chief authorities on the subject. But it is hard that hundreds of thousands of working men should be denied reasonable leisure because a few employers will not believe a thing possible which is II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 65 being done every day. Mr. Allan seems not un- likely to prove right in saying the employers will never adopt the eight-hours system till they are compelled by legislation, and in the case of engineering, unlike mining, legislation could not force employers into any fresh expenses or do any worse harm than brush away their idle prejudice a little roughly. To these objections from the side of the employers must be added another raised from the side of the workmen, not to the eight-hours day itself, but to its immediate introduction in the engineering trade — the objection that from the great prevalence of systematic overtime in that trade it would be practically too great a descent to take at one time, to fall from 9 hours with regular overtime to 8 hours without it. It is best in any event to proceed with caution, but it is certainly very doubtful whether the world has ever gained anything by systematic overtime, and whether men would not do quite the same amount of work from year's end to year's end if it were abolished altogether. Mr. Bowling, one of the factory inspectors, remarks that he was struck with the frequency with which employers said to him overtime was utterly unprofitable, and nobody can read any of the reports of commissions on labour or trade questions without being struck with the same circumstance. Incidental overtime may be un- avoidable in the engineering trade, but the persistent overtime now habitually wrought might probably be abolished with positive benefit to production. 66 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. Last spring the English Government, showing for once an enterprise above that of private employers, introduced the eight-hours day by way of experiment at the cartridge factory at Woolwich Arsenal, and al- though no details of the results of that experiment liave been published, it is understood that as much, and even more work was done by the men in the day after the reduction of hours than was done before it. At any rate the experiment proved so successful that Mr. Campbell Bannerman, to whom the credit of it is due, announced in Parliament on the 5th of January the intention of the War Department to adopt the eight- hours system as the general rule in all the public ordnance factories. " The result of my inquiries," he said, in reply to Mr. John Burns, " has been to satisfy myself and my colleagues that the conditions and cir- cumstances of those factories and the nature of the work done in them are such as to admit of the reduction to 48 hours a week, or an average of 8 hours a day, with advantage both to the public service and to the men employed, and I will direct that the change shall be brought into operation as soon as the necessary arrangements can be made." This reform of hours in the ordnance factories will probably affect 16,000 work- men, but Mr Campbell Bannerman stated on the 11th of January that " it was not anticipated that any additional workmen would be required as a result of reducing the working hours at the War Office factories to 48 per week, save in exceptional cases. A 11 THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 67 careful comparison had been made of the results ob- tained elsewhere, and the conclusion (confirmed by the Department's own experience) had been formed that any increase in wages would be compensated for by a saving in fuel, &c., by the increased energy of the work- men, aod lastly, by the prevention of lost time owing to the suppression of the breakfast hour." Mr. W. Woodall, M.P., the Financial Secretary to the War Office, who had much to do with the initiation and execution of the experiment, said in a speech to his constituents that " he pledged himself as a man of business experience that he had not recommended these important changes until he had satisfied himself that they could be carried out not only with benefit to the workmen, but with advantage and even perhaps some saving to the nation in various ways," and he added that he had completed arrangements for the further extension of the eight-hours system to the army clothing factories. The new scheme came into opera- tion at the ordnance factories on the 26th of February. The adoption of the eight-hours day by the War Office must give a great impetus to the eight-hours cause, and fruits already begin to appear. In the first place the enterprise of the War Office has naturally stirred up the sister department, the Admiralty, to the serious contemplation of the introduction of the eight-hours day into the Government dockyards, which indeed would not involve any great change since the present hours in the dockyards are only 51 a week. F 2 68 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. Then Kynoch and Co., ammunition manufacturers, Bir- mingham, made immediate arrangements for the reduc- tion of the hours in their factory on the 8th of February from 54 to 48 a week — 8f hours a day for the first five days of the week, and 4;| hours on Saturday. Two-thirds of their hands are piece-workers, and the rates for piece- work are to remain unaltered, but the wages of the day-workers are to be raised from 8d. to 9d. per hour, so that their earnings for the week will be the same as they were before the change. Hardly a week passes now without evidence appearing in the newspapers of the im- pression made in the country by the Government experi- ment and the disposition it has created to give a fair hearing and even a fair trial to the eight-hours cause. The experiment itself, moreover, is in its results a virtual counterpart of a similar experiment made in the arsenals of the United States as long ago as 1868, though the American experiment unfortunately seems to have been made mainly to answer a party purpose before an election, and was suffered to die, in spite of its success, after that purpose had been served. In 1868 the eight-hours day was introduced by law into all Government works in the United States, but the superintendent of the works immediately reduced the men's wages to correspond, that is, they were paid the old rate per hour. This was done in the Spring- field armoury, amongst other places. The New York Tribune quotes the first report of the commandant of that armoury on the effect of the new experiment. He II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 69 states that the file workers managed to make, under the old taritf of wages, quite as much per day under the eight-hours as under the ten-hours system, and that he believed the day workmen had worked harder and more faithfully under the eight-hours system than under the ten-hours. The foreman of the milling department re- ported, in August 17, 1868, that the average earnings of 1,212 piece-workers under the ten-hours system in the month of June previous was 2.60 dollars, whereas in July, under the eight-hours system, they earned 2.88 per day. In other words, they did considerably more work in 8 hours than they used to do in 10. In the water shops the foreman reported that the average earnings of 23 piece-workers in his department were 3.12 dollars a day under the ten-hours system, and 3.13 under the eight-hours, while in the filing department the piece-workers did not make quite so much as their old earnings just at the beginning of the new order of things, but they were already making as much, and even more, before the report was written.^ I shall deal with the experience of the eight-hours system in Victoria in a separate chapter, but a Sydney case may be stated here. The iron trades employed in the Australian Steamship Company's works at that place got the eight-hours day in 1858 on condition of accepting a proportional reduction of wages, but after a year's trial the company found that between the better work they obtained during working hours and the ^ Massachusetts Labour Bureau Ecport for 1872, p. 250. "70 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. saving of gas, oil, and other items of expense, they could afford to pay the men the old ten-hour wages, and did so.^ Hadfield's Steel Foundry Company in Sheffield re- duced their hours in 1891 not indeed to 48, but to 51 in the week from 54, and have found as much work done in the week as before, and even more. " In fact," says Mr. Hadfield, "they (the engineering foremen) con- sider the same jobs were turned out in less rather than more time, and several cases of this were instanced." ^ The experiment has proved, says Mr. Hadfield, " emiD- ently satisfactory," and has not added in any way to the cost of production. " The management on its side has perfected better methods, and the workers on their side have shown more intelligent interest in carrying out the work to be done," and the result is due to the co-opera- tion of these two factors. It has imposed apparently neither any additional expense on the employers nor any severer tension of exertion on the employed, but has come from more intelligent organisation on the part of the one and more intelligent interest on the part of the other. The change has been attended, as such changes often, indeed usually, are, by a remarkable improvement in the punctuality of the workers, and this alone goes far to account for the result. " Taking the comparison haphazard, viz., for the months of January, 1891 and 1892, in the former case out of ^ MasmcTni setts Labour Report, 1872, p. 248. ^ Hadfield and Gibbins, A Shorter Working Day, p. 149. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 71 about 500 men, 72 averaged half an hour late each morning during the month, 22 a commencement of work at 9 A.M. (instead of 6 A.M.). In January, 1892, the whole of the men, except a daily average of 19, were in at work punctually at the starting time — 6.30 A.M." 1 There were different kinds of labour em- ployed in the foundry — engineers, smiths, fettlers^ founders and general labourers — but the results were the same in all departments. Some branches of the Sheffield hardware manufacture run 8 hours and even less, but I am not able to produce any evidence comparing results of the eight- hours with other systems in that trade. Several inter- esting reports come, however, from the hardware industry in America. Messrs. L. and J. J. White, hardware manu- facturers, Buffalo, ran their works 10 hours a day from 1842 to 1870, and 8 hours a day from 1875 to 1879, and found that the change made very little apparent difference in the amount of the product; while a cutlery firm in New York, Messrs. Weed and Becker, state that though their nominal day of labour is 10 hours they never actually run more than 8 because the work is exhausting, and they find the men turn out more product in 8 hours than in 10.^ In the glass-bottle-making trade the present rule is 9^ hours, but most of the employers are desirous of introduc- ing eight-hour shifts, and one of them, Mr. D. Rylands, ^ Hadtield and Gibbins, A Shorter Working Day, p. 148. "^ United Stales Census for 1880, AVeeks' Report, p. 165. 72 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. actually introduced that system in 1887, but he has since given it up for the following reason : " Because the men got so that they could make as many bottles in the 7| hours as they used to make in the 9 hours. In fact some made more, and the furnaces are not large enough to give a sufficient quantity of glass for the men working at that tremendous rate." ^ It may be explained that though Mr. Rylands says 9 hours here, he had already stated the hours of effec- tive work, on the two-shift system, exclusive of meal time, to be 18|, or 9^ hours per shift. On the eight-hours system the time of effective work was 7^ hours. So that we have men here obtaining a reduction of If hours, and coming — not at once apparentl}^ but in pro- cess of time — to do as much work and more than they had done before. Under the long-shift system the men were not suffered away for dinner, but were obliged to eat it hastily in front of the hot furnace, and to set to work again instantly it was eaten. This led to universal indigestion, and was probably as unfavour- able to good work as it was to good health. The English glass bottle manufacturers are generally anxious to adopt the eight-hours system, but the men at present ojipose the change from a recollection of a case where it had been made and caused a serious fall in wages. But the industry is well adapted for eight-hour shifts. It is a number of years since a glass manufac- turer near Dusseldorf, M. Heye, reduced the hours of ^ Labour Commission Hcport, C. Qu. 30366. 11 THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 73 his workers from 10 and 11 to 8, and got as much from them in the day after the reduction as before it.^ Chemical works, engaged in the manufacture of bleaching powder, salt cake, vitriol, caustic soda, black ash, bichromate of potash, &c., constitute another branch of industry well adapted for eight-hour shifts, because the process of production requires to go on continuously, night and day, Sunday and Saturday, and because in most departments the work, though not perhaps in itself arduous, is yet attended with grave danger to health, arising from the deleterious gases the labourers are obliged to inhale. They inin constant peril of getting " gassed " as they call it, that is, of bronchial inflammation, or even sudden suffocation, or of inflammation of the eyes, or in some departments of ulcerations, which often take away the septum of their nose or leave " chrome holes " on their hands or arms, and they are more susceptible to the gas in the last two or three hours than in the rest of the da3^ In the most trying department, the bleaching powder department, where the joackers work with a " muzzle " of thirty folds of flannel tied tight round their mouth and neck, and the act of breathing becomes itself an exhausting labour, their hours have always been short, 6 hours a day in England and 8 hours a da}' in Scot- land ; but in most of the other departments the work has usually been done by two shifts working each 12 hours a day seven days a week. True, they are ^ Revue des Dcicx Muiulcs, Ixxxiv. , p. 132. 74 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. not engaged in active labour during the whole 12 hours. Though the process of production is con- tinuous, the personal labour of the operatives is very discontinuous. A caustic worker explained the condi- tion of affairs to the recent Chemical Works Committee of inquiry. " We may have," he said, " an hour or an hour and a half with nothing to do scarcely, and some- times 3 hours with nothing to do, and then 4 or 5 hours hard work, and then again 3 hours with scarcely anything to do except to keep our eyes about us." Figures were given to the same committee by the United Alkali Company relating to three separate works of theirs in the St. Helens district, and showing that the proportion of the men's time on duty which they spend in actual work varies considerably, not merely between one department and another in the same works, but between one worker and another in the same department. The hours of attendance in the vitriol department of the Globe Works are the same as in the vitriol department of the Greenbank Works — 84 a week — but the time spent in actual labour at the former is only 30 hours, while in the latter it is 50. The proportion seems to be larger in the other depart- ments, but still even in this vitriol department the labour is so injurious that most of the works on the Tyne and the St. Rollox Works in Glasgow had long conducted it by three eight-hour shifts, even before they thought of extending the same system to other depart- ments. The employers have found the system answer n THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 75 so well that they are now rapidly making it the general rule. The Labour Commission was informed that all the chemical works on Tyneside except one have now adopted the three eight-hour shifts, though it would appear from the appendix of the report of the recent Chemical Works Committee that the old twelve-hours system is still retained in one or two departments in each of the four Tyneside works mentioned there. But however that may be, the Labour Commission witness, Mr. T. Steel, made another statement, more important for our present purpose, and that was, that when the eight-hours system was adopted, about the same product was still obtained in the day as used to be got under the twelve- hours system, though in some cases this result was partly due to the assistance of improved machinery.^ Messrs. Gaskell, Deacon and Co., Widnes, liave also sub- stituted eiffht-hour for twelve-hour shifts in their works, and the wages earned are very little less, and the men enjoy better health and comfort.^ Messrs. Brun- ner, Mond and Co., Northwich, made the same change four years ago, and found it answer so well that though they at first reduced the wages of tiieir men to some extent they have since raised them again to the old rate. They have lately stated to the Home Office Departmental Committee on the health of chemical workers, that though they now pay the same wages for 8 hours work as they formerly paid for 12 hours Avork, ^ Lnhoior Commission Report, C, 21G02. 2 Ibid., C, 22419-25. 16 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chae. the cost of labour per ton of alkali is no more now than it was then, and that this result is due partly to im- provement in the apparatus used, effected at consider- able cost, and partly to " the increased efficiency of the men due to their better health and spirits." The doctor had to attend only half as many men in the year 1893 as in the year 1889, and what is equally remarkable, drunkenness, very common four years ago, has largely disappeared. Though the shift in these chemical works is 8 hours a day, the men work seven shifts in the week, since the work continues during: Sunday, so that the week is a 56 hours week, not a 48 hours one. But it is very remarkable to find that this great reduction of 28 hours a week — from 84 to 56 — has been accomplished without making any difference to the labourer's weekly output of sufficient significance to tell on his wages. It seems the more remarkable after reading how confidently various members of the recent Chemical Works Committee declared to the working men they were examining that the thing could not possibly be done. "You see," said Mr. Fletcher, alkali inspector, to one witness, " the chambers would not produce any more in the three shifts ; that is when you have got the eight-hours shift the chambers Avill produce exactly the same with the three eight-hours shifts as with the two twelve-hours shifts." And Mr. Richmond, the secretary of the committee, said to another witness that he did not see how it was possible to get more work out of the pots with three eight-hour n THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 77 shifts than with two of 12 hours, because the pots were always in operation. But if we believe Mr. Brunner,. who speaks from actual experience, that is the exact thing which has been done, for, as these gentlemen themselves state in their report, the result is attributed by Mr. Brunner " partly to the increased efficiency of the men due to their better health and spirits." I shall have occasion presently to discuss this question of the relation of personal efficiency and machinery more fully, but meanwhile this case may be taken to show that the amount of production is never a mere matter of pots or chambers, but is always quite as much, and generally more, a matter of mind and muscle. One thing is obvious at a glance ; in so unhealthy and uncomfortable a trade, the loss from interruptions and waste must be much smaller on the three-shift than on the two-shift system. Mining experts in Germany have calculated that in mining three eight-hour shifts make effective use of 94 or 97 per cent, of the 24 hours, while two twelve-hour shifts make effective use of no more than 83, and sometimes no more than 67 per cent. Supposing that for the moment to be correct, then it is easy to see that a gain of 30 per cent, on the day's production might be worth more to the employers than the wages of even the 50 per cent, more hands which the substitution of three shifts for two might be thought to require, and in the case of Messrs. Brunner, Mond and Co., it must be remembered that the change did not involve an addition of 50 per 78 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. cent, to their staff but only 12^ per cent. They employed nine men after the change for every eight they employed before it.i Sir Charles Tennant and Co. (now the St. RoUox Alkali Co.) have been working on the three eight-hour shift system for the last 25 years in the vitriol depart- ment of their works on the Tyne and for a shorter period in the same department of their works in Glasgow, and in both cases with such complete satis- faction that they have now decided to extend the system to all the other departments. The mechanics and artisans (masons, plumbers, bricklayers, coopers, &c.) employed in the work were put on the eight-hours system shortly before the new year, and in the case of these trades the eight-hours day means a 48 hours week, for they do not work on Sunday. The furnacemen have since re- ceived the eight-hours day, in their case a 56 hours week. The wages of all classes have however been reduced slightly — by something like 10 per cent. — in consequence of the shorter hours, at least in the meanwhile.^ Messrs. Burroughs, Wellcome and Co., manufacturing chemists, London, carry on a dilferent kind of work from the chemical manufacturers already mentioned, and carried it on until a few years ago on the nine-hours system and with a single shift, but a few years ago they introduced the eight-hours day and say that the amount of work produced is very nearly, if not quite, ^ Daily Chronicle, December 1, 1891. ^ Glasgow Echo. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 79 as great as it was under the nine -hours system, though none of their hands are paid by the piece, and that the cost of production has not materially increased,^ Similar results have been obtained under the eight- hours system by Messrs. Caslon and Co., typefounders, London. In 1890 they had a meeting with their em- ployees and stated that if the latter could send down the same quantity of work as they did before, the firm would shorten their hours and still pay them the same wages. The men have done so, and they are not paid by the piece. The hours are not 48 a week, but 50 a week, with this proviso, however, that the firm credits each man with his two odd hours and allows him to add them up and take an equivalent holiday on full pay.^ A good deal of attention has been attracted by the eight-hours experiment of Mr. Mark Beaufoy, M.P., jam and vinegar manufacturer, London. Having already abolished over- time in his works and found the abolition advantageous, Mr. Beaufoy in 1889 adopted the eight-hours day be- cause he thought the early morning hours of work were as unprofitable to him as the late overtime hours in the evening. " The hours before breakfast were almost wasted, because the men were too cold and hungry to set to work with a will." Mr. Beaufoy changed the hours accordingly from 6 to 5 with two breaks, to 8 to 5 with one break, and 8 to 12 on Saturday — a week of 45 hours — and he paid the same wages. After one 1 Webb and Cox, EUjht Hours Day, p. 255, 2 Ibid., p. 257. 80 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. whole year's experience, he says : " During this year, from September, 1889, to September, 1890, we did more business than in ahnost any year I can remember, but not one hour of overtime was worked." The staff was the same, except for the addition of three or four gate-porters and watchmen, and the wages seem not to have been paid by the piece.^ The London building trades have now obtained the eight-hours day, but if the employers' accusations be true that their workmen have been deliberately restrict- ing their production for the last twenty years, the experi- ment will have little value as a test of the effect of shorter work-hours on the product of the work. Evi- dence, however, is not wanting of the economic value of eight-hours shifts among masons. Lord Brassey relates a striking case. " During the construction of the Trent Valley line of railway," says he, " immense efforts were made to complete the work in the shortest possible time, and in order to expedite to the utmost degree the completion of the station at Atherstone, two shifts of men were employed in the building, each of them working 8 hours a day. It was found that each shift, although working for only 8 hours, did more work in a day than other men employed for the full number of hours, which at that time constituted a day's work, viz., 10 hours a day." ^ Herr Freese, window-blind maker at Hamburg and 1 Webb aud Cox, The Eight Hours Day, p. 262. ^ Work and Wages, p. 147. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 81 Berlin, having first abolished Sunday labour and over- time and found it advantageous, then reduced his regular hours of work to 9 a day in 1890, and finding that again advantageous, tried the experiment of 8 hours a day in his Berlin factory for two months last year, and with such satisfactory results that he adopted the eight-hours system as a permanent arrangement in 1892. His particular arrangement of the hours is from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. with half an hour off for breakfast at 8.30 and an hour and a half off at noon. He employs various kinds of skilled labour, but the result has been the same with all alike. Of eight joiners working by the piece at the same rate, four earned less in the 8 hours in 1892 than in the 9 hours in 1891, and four earned more, and the total average earnincfs of the eight were more. Of four fitters, two earned less and two earned more, the average being a trifle less. Of four painters and lackerers, two earned less and two earned more, the average being a little more. Of two lock- smiths and tinsmiths both earned less, nearly a third less, but this is ascribed to bad trade. Of the three machine-room hands, two earned more and one earned less, and the average was a little more. Of four hands in the sewing and repairs room, two earned more and two earned less, the average being more. The majority of the hands therefore earned better wages in 8 hours work than in 9 ; when they earned less there was no instance in which the decrease was as great as the reduction of hours, llinj per cent., and the general o 82 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. average of earnings was higher. More work, therefore, was done in an eight-hours day than in a nine-hours one, and the result is attributed to greater punctuality of attendance and greater energy in working. The im- provement in punctuality was attested by the marked diminution in the fines for lateness in the morning and for absence on the Monday. Formerly one of the workmen said Monday was the brother of Sunday, but now their brotherhood is dissolved. The old men found it more difficult, however, to keep up the more energetic rate of work than the younger men, and probably some of the cases of decreased earnings may be due to that cause. The machines wrought in the machine-room were circular saws and fluting planes, quite as automatic, one may presume, as Mr. Seaton's lathe, but the improvement in the product was more remarkable in the machine work than in the hand work, though it is stated the speed of the machines was not increased and could not be for fear they should get too hot. To this it must be added that Herr Freese says that while the quantity of the product has increased the quality has in no way fallen, off, and that he has made no inconsiderable saving in gas and fire. Along with this experiment of Herr Freese may be mentioned the case of a cabinet-making works in New York, which adopted the eight-hours system in 1885, and the foreman of which reports that on looking over the pay-roll in the two principal shops for the months of August and September, 1885, under the ten- 11 THE EIGHT-HOUKS DAY AT WORK 83 hours system, and for the same months in 1886 under the eight-hours S3^stem, he found hardly any difference noticeable, and that some men did even better.^ In the United States for the last half- century there have been always a great many establishments running only 8 hours a day. In fact, the proportion of eight- hour establishments to the total number of establish- ments in that country was exactly the same half a century ago as it is now, and they include a great diversity of trades. In Massachusetts, for example, where the general rule is 10 hours, there is scarcely a single industry in which some of the shops do not stop at 8 hours, although there is only one trade in the State in which 8 hours is the general rule — artificial tooth-making. The eight-hours day is adopted in 5 out of 31 establisliments for the manufacture of arms and ammunition ; in 17 out of 255 shipbuilding yards, in 35 out of 547 printing and bookbinding firms, in 36 out of 217 tobacco factories, in 28 out of 2,582 metal-work- ing shops, in 30 out of 2,257 boot and shoe factories, in 10 out of 3,334 building firms, in 8 out of 1,009 carriage works, and so on in 32 different branches of industry. It seems an obvious conclusion that when so many establishments have found the way to make short hours pay in the face of the overwhelming competition of their long-hour neighbours, there can be no essential reason why the rest should not make short hours pay likewise. ^ New York Statistics of Labour Bureau Report, 1886, p. 663. g2 84 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. The eight-hours day has thus been tried in a very large number and variety of industries with striking success, and the lesson taught by these experiments will not be found in the least impaired by a considera- tion of the few cases in which the experiment is said to have failed, or to have only partially succeeded. Messrs. Green, M'Allan and Feilden, printers and engravers, London, say they tried it for seven months, and found it financially a failure.^ But they seem really never to have tried the eight-hours system at all. Overtime was wrought as regularly in their office as in other London offices, and as they state, moi'e over- time in proportion under the short day than under the long one. They say themselves that the average hours of London compositors are nearer 60 hours a week than 54, and if their week was really a 60 hours week, what did it matter that it was nominally a 48 hours one ? The only change made was that they would have to pay overtime rates for another hour in the day, and that the men would be apt to dawdle during ordinary time in order to postpone the work till the better paid over- time. Others in the same or similar lines of business have not found shorter hours answer so ill. Messrs. Thomas Bushill and Sons are printers as well as bookbinders in Coventry, and when they reduced their hours in 1892 from 54 to 50 a week — not quite to the eight-hours limit, but close on it — they experienced no 1 Webb and Cox, Eight Hours Day, p. 259. II THE EIGHT-HOUES DAY AT WORK 85 diminution of production whatever.^ Mr. Bushill informs me by letter that now after eighteen months' trial the re- sults continue to be as favourable as at first, and that though the old rate of wages has been maintained there has never been any increase in the cost of production. On the matter of overtime, which occasioned difficulty to Messrs. Green, M' Allan and Feilden, Mr. Bushill's experience is striking. After remarking that some em- ployers fear an eight-hours day would only lead to the employees working more overtime, he says : " In actual fact we find a greater disinclination to overtime than before. This is probably because a man leaving work at 6 o'clock has an evening before him, whereas if he works till 7 it is only a matter of an hour or so of leisure." That is a very probable explanation, and various facts recorded in the present volume go to con- firm it. And to show the increasing value which work-people are led to set upon their longer evening of leisure after a little experience of it, Mr. Bushill mentions that a fortnight before he wrote, one of his foremen came to him with the self-sacrificing proposal " that the foremen should be paid their level wage, week by week, without any addition for overtime." That meant a probable loss to this worker of several shillings a week. He said however, " If the foremen receive nothino- for their overtime it will be a natural ^ Labmir Commission Report. Commission as a whole, 5896-8. See also T. W. Bushill's Profit Sharing and the Lahoxir Question. 86 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. incentive for them to get the work done somehow in the ordinary hours." The Missouri Labour Bureau reports that the eight- hours day was introduced among book printers in that State without causing any diminution in the tale of daily work done.^ The lithographic printers of Manchester working 9 hours a day, got their hours reduced a few years ago by 2h a week, and Mr. E. D. Kelly told the Labour Commission that the reduction made very little difference in the amount turned out in the day. Gas-works are an industry in which eight-hours shifts have been very largely substituted for twelve-hour ones From a statement of Mr. Thorne, the secretary of the Gas-workers' Union, it appears that the eight- hours shift is now the most common rule in the pro- vinces, and even before 1886 it was already very common there. The Board of Trade Wages Census of that year mentions as many as twenty-three gasworks conducted on the eight-hours shift system in the few districts selected for the purposes of that census, and they employed 1,104 men, as compared with 2,831 working still on the twelve-hours system in the same districts. The average wages were only a few pence a week lower in the eight-hour works than in the twelve-hour ones, but that is of course in the case of gas-works no index to their relative production, inasmuch as gas is always a monopoly and any rise in the cost of producing it can be easily transferred to the price. Since the 1 Quoted in Massachidsetts Labour Bureaus Report for 1881, p. 448. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 87 establishment of the Gas-workers' Union, the eight- hours system has been adopted in a number more of the provincial towns, and also in London. But the results have been curiously diverse. Before stating these it may be well to recollect that in gas-stoking on the twelve-hours system the men usually work an hour and rest an hour alternately, or in some places work an hour and rest fifty minutes, so that 6 or 7 hours of effective work is all that is ever performed. Shortening the hours to 8 means mainly shortening these alternate intervals of rest. Many stokers — at some works the majority — prefer retaining those long breathing spaces, just as they prefer working on Sunday, because they would not know what to do with leisure if they got it, and they have not infrequently petitioned for a restoration of the twelve- hours system, or welcomed the restoration with satisfaction when it was proposed. In gas-works the day's task is a fixed quantity pre- scribed or agreed upon beforehand — so many retorts — and in making the arrangements for the reduction of hours, the men were able in most cases to secure at the same time an express reduction in the number of retorts they were required to do, and this reduction varied in different works. The results therefore varied, but in this industry, unlike the others, they varied by pre- arrangement. At Sheffield apparently the tale of retorts was not reduced, for it was stated by Mr. Livesey at the Labour Commission, and corroborated by a local witness, the 88 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. representative of the Sheffield Gas-workers' Union, that the gas-workers of Sheffield had comjn-essed nearly as much work into their 56 hours a week as they used to do in their 84.^ What can be done in Sheffield can be done in London, and possibly would be done, if gas were a com- modity of which the London producers could be exposed to the competition of Sheffield. As things stand, however, none of the London gas companies have been able to get the same results out of the shorter day as the Sheffield company has done, but the reduction of work has been in no case nearly pro- portional to the reduction of hours, and has been in all cases largely due to other causes of disturbance than the shortening of the hours, causes which are said to be now disappearing. The worst results were obtained by Mr. Livesey's own company, the South Metropolitan, which in one-third less time got one-sixth less work. Then the Gaslight and Coke Company got one-seventh less, and the Commercial Gas Company got only one twelfth less.^ This comparison is based on the number of retorts filled in the day before and after the reduction of hours, but one of the Commercial Com- pany's stokers, Mr. A. Linton, said that though they were filling fewer retorts in the day, they were never- theless going through as much work and even more than formerly, because they were running three scoops to the retort now, and were only running two scoops to 1 C. Qu. 23519, 23550. ^ q q^ 23953-9. ri THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 89 the retort before. They were actually handling more coals in the day than they did on the long shift, for though there might be only QQ retorts now in place of 72, 216 scoops were carried in place of 202.^ The manager of the Commercial Company, Mr. W. E. Jones, tells a different story. The whole experiment has cost the Company an addition of 48 per cent, to their wages- bill, but of course this has not all come from the mere diminution of 83 per cent, in the time of work. It has come largely from the increase simultaneously made in the labourers' wages and the exceptional rates immediately afterwards granted for Sunday work. Still a good part of the loss is attributed by him to the decrease in the quantity of work done, but he gives no exact estimate of the amount of the diminution, and much of the diminution was, according to his own ac- count, due to temporary perturbation. " The retorts began to be less well filled with coals than they had been under the older system, chiefly because the men were not so orderly and obedient." The same com- plaint is made by the other gas companies. Mr. Livesey, of the South Metropolitan, says their men did not keep their promise to work well after the reduction in their hours, and absolutely refused to do certain parts of their accustomed work ; and the engineer of the Gaslight and Coke Company states that their stokers at the time of the change of hours, for divers reasons, did not do their best, but had begun to do 1 C. 25428-35. 90 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. better now. The dock strike occurred immediately after the eight-hours concession was made in the Lon- don gas-works in 1889, and the stokers were extremely excited by what was going on outside, and would often throw down their tools and refuse to work lonofer on account of some supposed grievance. The natural inference from all this seems to be that if the men had been in an undisturbed state of mind, and were doinor their best, the slight diminution of one-twelfth in the Commercial Company, or even the larger diminution of one-sixth in the South Metropolitan, might have been made up without any serious difficulty. In Darwen, where the cost of gas was raised one sixth after the change from the twelve-hours to the eight-hours system, the increase of cost was caused, not by the shortening of hours itself, but by the fact that the stokers refused at the same time to do certain kinds of work they had been contentedly accustomed to do before. They refused to clean and scurf the pipes and to carry their tools, and clamoured for a number of other changes of the same kind.^ The eight-hours shift replaced the twelve-hours shift for a time in one of the Cleveland blast furnaces, but it was not meant to be a permanent arrangement, beino' adopted to meet some special temporary conditions of the trade, and was given up, it is said by one of the Labour Commission witnesses, on account of "bad facilities of working," the nature of which he leaves ^ Labour Commission, C. Qu. 26050. II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 91 unexplained.^ But all the furnaces in West Cumber- land adopted the eight-hours shift on 1st October, 1890, and after a year's working Mr. Walls, President of the National Association of Blast Furnacemen, and agent of the Cumberland branch, said the change had proved satisfactory both to employers and employed, though it caused to the latter a loss of one-fifteenth of their wages, and to the former an increase of an eighth in the labour cost of the product.^ Mr. Williams, a Middlesborough ironmaster, calculated that the third shift in blast furnaces must, even with certain reductions of wages, add at least a third to the cost of the product^ but here in West Cumberland it has added only an eighth, so that the change is much less expensive than employers presuppose, the reason being — what em- ployers so often fail to take into their calculations — that the men work proportionately harder in the 8 hours than in the 12, and that they are more seldom off duty through overwork. Under the twelve- hours system — which means 84 hours work a week — the employers are obliged to have what is practically a spare shift of men engaged to take the places of those who fail from overwork, and though these men are only paid for the time they actually serve as substitutes, still odd work of some kind must be found for them at other times about the yard, especially when trade is brisk, so as to keep them within call, when they may be wanted. Under an eight-hours system these by-turn 1 A. Qu. 14169. 2 ^^ Qy_ 14425. 92 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. hands — who are of course inferior workers to the men whose places they take — become less necessary, and thus a second saving is effected through the improve- ment m the working capacity of the ordinary hands effected by the shortening of their hours.^ It is true that in the case of these West Cumberland blast furnacemen the recoupment from this source has not been so great as has occurred in many of the other trades we have been considering. In a third less time they do about a fifth less work, but it must be remembered that that was the first year after the experiment began, and that blast furnacemen are precisely one of those over- worked trades in which the full effects of the shorter hours are only obtained after a period of time. There seemed to be every reason to expect better results next year, because the men were showina; decisive sio^ns of both physical and moral improvement. Their temperance societies had increased in membership 50 per cent. during the year, and the provident and trade societies had spent 20 or 25 per cent, less on sick allowances, both results being attributed to the relief from the undue fatigue from which all had suffered before. How far this evident recovery of the vital energies necessar}^ for work would have gone cannot now be said, because before another year came the Cumberland blast furnaces had stopped working — not in consequence of the eight- hours system, for the twelve-hours ones stopped as well as the others — and with men earning no wages the » A. 14163. II THE EIGHT-HOUES DAY AT WORK 93 jjiocess of physical improvement could not be exj)ected to continue. So far therefore as the problem of the elFect of shortening hours on production is concerned, this case of the West Cumberland blast furnaces must be treated as merely an unfinished experiment. It proves conclusively enough that the third shift will not add 50 per cent, or even 33 per cent, to the cost of production, but it leaves practically undetermined the question whether in blast furnaces, as in so many other branches of work, it can be introduced without any ultimate addition to cost at all. Neither the experience of the West Cumberland blast furnaces nor the experience of the London gas- works therefore furnishes any valid evidence against the general conclusion which the whole history of the short-hours movement and the special history of the eight-hours experiments seem strongly to suggest, viz., that if masters and men both do their part aright, we can in the great run of occupations get as good a day's work done regularly in 8 hours as in any longer working day This suggestion is strongly supported (1) by the large number of experiments in which the eight-hours system has succeeded compared with the small number and indecisive character of those in which it has failed ; (2) by the great variety of the occui3ations in which it has been successfully tried ; (3) by the number of the cases in which production has been even increased by it, and sometimes without piece-work or any other special spur. In this last respect the record of the 94 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. eight-hours day is really more striking than the record of either the ten-hours day or the nine-hours day. There are some occupations of course in which the work does not admit of being compressed into shorter time or in which its compressibility does not depend on the will or exertions of the workman. A watchman is on duty for a fixed time and cannot put the required amount of watching into a shorter term, because presence for the specified time is of the essence of his task. An omnibus conductor or railway guard cannot conduct as many omnibuses or trains in 8 hours as in 12 because the times of running of the omnibus or train are fixed independently of the conductor or guard by his employers. A barber could easily compress as much work into 8 hours as he now does in 12 if his customers would come to him at his convenience instead of their own, but if he adopted short hours he very probably might not do as much work, simply because his customers might not find it convenient to crowd in to him in greater numbers in the shorter time. Even in classes of occupations like these, shorter hours would often be attended by im- portant economies. The work or service would often be better done. A watchman would not watch so well if his hours were too protracted and miglit cause loss to his employer thereby, and both the public and the railway companies would gain from a shortening of hours which diminished the accidents traceable to over- fatigued railway servants. But on the whole in such II THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AT WORK 95 occupations shorter hours would generally mean in- creased cost, and the burden would have to be borne by employers or workmen or the public, or, as it was in the case of the eight-hours day in the Huddersfield tramways, by all three together. Occupations of this character, however, are, com- paratively speaking, not numerous, and emjjloy but a small fraction of the working class. In the great mass of the staple industries of any country, on the contrary — the industries requiring physical or mental exertion — it is possible by improvement in the personal efficiency of the labourer to compress more work into any definite space of time than was done in it before ; and positive experience can safely be said to encourage rather than discourage the hope that most men will do as good a day's work in 8 hours as they can do at all. This hope will appear more and more reasonable as we consider the diverse sources from which the improve- ment in the working powers of the labourer has come in the past, and the unexhausted reserves of personal efficiency on which we may still call in the future. That we shall take up in the next chapter. CHAPTER III THE RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY The increase of product per hour, which we have seen so generally accompanying the reduction of the hours of work, has in some cases been aided by the improvement or speeding of the machinery m use, but the aid derived from this quarter has been after all surprisingly small, and in all cases much the gi'eatest part of the effect, in many cases the whole of it, must be ascribed to the improvement and speeding of the personal agent in production. I have quoted the case of cotton mills in Lancashire, of which the details are given by Mr. Horner and in which out of £22 worth more work done in the ten hours only £5 worth, or one-fourth of the result, could be ascribed to increased speeding of machinery, and the remaining £17, or more than three-fourths of the whole, came from closer attention and greater accurac}' of work on the part of the operatives. In Switzerland, the usual increase of speed in the machinery was only 2h per cent., while the Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 97 increase of product per hour was 8 per cent. Change of the machinery itself was of course always much less frequent than change in the speed of the machinery, so much less frequent that it would not afifect the general result. The change from which that mainly accrued was a change in the physical and mental energies of the workpeople themselves. Indeed in many factories, and in some whole trades, no other change had taken place. Various expedients, no doubt, were often practised for the purpose of whipping up these energies to their utmost exertion. Piece-work may have been substituted for day-work, or overlookers been paid a premium on the output; but after all is told, there remains the great fact without which no amount of whipping would have been effectual, that under the shorter hours the workpeople themselves brought with them every morning a greater store of energy to respond to such stimulation, and that it flowed out more freely and readily into their labour than before. This is sho^vn by two facts : the effect took place, often strikingly, under day-work without any new stimulation at all ; and it often took place only gradually, and after a time, even when piece-work or other expedients had been adopted from the tirsL. There was no piece-work in Messrs. Allan and Co.'s shop, or in Messrs. Johnson's, and there is no piece- work among the masons and outdoor trades of Victoria, whose great " go " and energy strike most visitors from the old country, and are said by resident H 98 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. observers to have perceptibly increased since the shorten- ing of their working day. In such cases the improve- ment is spontaneous, perhaps even insensible. Many instances might be given of the gradual nature of the effect. The Hon. W, Gray, Treasurer of the Atlantic Mills, Lawrence, U.S.A., states that when the hours of these mills were reduced in liS67 from lOf to 10, there was for the first month a diminution of product by 4 or 5 per cent., although they increased the speed 4 per cent, and introduced piece-work, but the loss was eventually converted into a gain without any other change in the machinery. The manager of a Massa- chusetts carpet mill reports of the reverse policy of lengthening the ten-hours day by running overtime for a season, that the production increased for the first month after the overtime began, but then the men grew listless, the quantity of their output fell off, the quality of the goods deteriorated, and by the third month the books showed that the mill was doing no more in the day with 10 hours and overtime to boot than it did before in the 10 hours alone. The imposi- tion of the strain takes time to tell to the full ; the relaxation of the strain does the same. In such cases the industrial capacity seems to re- cover a certain spring, as if out of relief from previous overpressure ; but, as will presently appear, it is an error to imagine that relief from overpressure is the only source, or even the chief source, of that improved industrial capacity of the workpeople which enables Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 99 them to do as much work in the short as in the long day, and to contend on that ground that a further reduction of hours cannot be attended with the same result except in the trades that still remain overworked. Of course you may define a trade to be ovenvorked merely because that particular result happens in it, merely because the Avorkers in it are found able to sustain their production after their hours have been shortened ; and in that case it is a mere truism to say that the effect in question will only take place in over- worked trades. But the contention I am now disputing would limit the effect to trades already knoAvn before the experiment to be suffering from positive and even extreme overwork. This seems to be the opinion of Professor Marshall, who holds that the adoption of an eight-hours day would generally diminish production where recourse was not made to double shifts, except in two classes of cases : first, " the extreme cases of over- work we have been considering " — that is, apparently cases where " the hours and the general conditions of labour are such as to cause great wear and tear of body or mind, or both, and to lead to a low standard of living " ; and second, the case of " the lowest grade of honest workers," who, though "few of them work very hard," have so little stamina that they are really over- strained by the work they do. But the ordinary English engineer, or mason, or shipbuilder, cannot be thought to belong to either of these categories, nor surely can the employes in Woolwich Arsenal, and yet they are H 2 100 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. all found doing as much work in 8 hours as they did in 9, and sometimes even more. The same thing has been now known to happen in a great variety of industries ; it is a much more general phenomenon than Professor Marshall appears to contemplate ; and it arises — and arises oftenest, I think — from other causes than the extreme overpressure either of well-fed or of ill-fed workers to which alone he is disposed to ascribe it. It has really come less frequently from the removal of any physical burden than from a general quickening of the intelligence, and it has come less frequently from relieving strain of any kind than from hauling in slack. It has often been a mere matter of method and arrangement, a suppression of irregular habits of work, so that the shortening of the nominal working time was really converted into a lengthening of the actual time at work. Indeed this circumstance has given rise to an objection of the very opposite character to that which we have now been considering. While the first set of objectors say the beneficial effect of shorter hours was due to the removal of overstraining, and cannot be expected to happen again, because there is little overstraining left to remove, this second set of objectors say the effect came from an increase of strain and intensity of work, and cannot be expected to happen again, because any further increase would break the health of the workers. Both objections may be considered and answered together. In the first place, while it is true that under the Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 101 short-hours system men work harder while they are at their work than they do unde^ tlifj>lbfig''^hours° system, it is also true that short hours and' hard wort impose less strain on the body thai! locg 'hoarS a,^<\ dafwdling, especially if the hours are passed in a hot, or dusty, or poisoned atmosphere, such as many trades are obliged to work in. The increased exertion during work-hours has always been balanced, and more than balanced, by the restorative effects of the longer period of repose or recreation in good air. While the men do as good a day's work as they did before, they improve in health or vigour. After the Ten Hours Act was six months in operation Mr. Horner reported that the workpeople had, many of them, told him they enjoyed better health than they used to enjoy ; and their story was confirmed by managers and overlookers, who said there had been less sickness in the mills than before, one manager, who was personally unfriendly to the ten-hours day, expressing great surprise to find how much better his men were in health, and how much more vigorously they worked, although their wages had sunk so low that many of them got scarce a bellyful of food.^ The effect of the Act of 1874 only repeated this experience of the Act of 1847. The textile workers again inten- sified their exertions, till they did their old day's work in the shorter term, and their intenser exertions have again in no way hurt their growth in bodily health and vigour. The Labour Commission heard many * Factory Report, Dec. 1848, pp. 16, 48. 102 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. complaints from textile workers of the injurious effects of thiej grverheaj;^; 91. ^^dusty atmosphere in wliich they were obliged to worli, and of the insufficient sanitary ari'ang.eii.i^ats^f'fat^torieJssbut there was only one serious complaint of overpressure — the complaint of Mr. Birt- wistle of the system in vogue in Burnley and North Lancashire generally of driving the workpeople on by overlookers paid a poundage on the product — and even this complaint was not made on the ground that it had inflicted any injury on the health of the workers, but on the ground that it had raised the standard of work to a point which workmen could not attain after they passed 50 or 60 years of age, and that this short- coming was often made the occasion of their dismissal. The grievance really attacked seems to be rather the harshness of dismissing old hands when they are get- ting past their best than any excess of strain, which is blamed for putting them past their best sooner than would otherwise happen. Moreover, the complaint is confined to the cotton weavers, and even among the cotton weavers to those of North Lancashire. Cotton weaving is done, as Dr. Bridges reported in 1883, in a tropical and relaxing atmosphere, loaded with deleteri- ous dust from the materials handled, and aggravated within recent years by the process of sizing. Startling facts were stated to the Labour Commission on local medical authority as to the unhealthiness of the occu- pation, and Dr. Ogle has shown from the Registrar- General's reports and tlie census that the rate of Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 103 mortality among Lancashire cotton operatives generally is considerably higher than the rate of mortality among Lancashire miners. But the remedy for this seems to lie, not in relaxation of strain, which has not caused it, but more probably in shortening the time spent in that vitiated atmospliere, even though this shortening of the working time be accompanied with a certain in- crease of exertion in the work. The Lancashire cotton weavers, as it is, do not work so hard as the American cotton weavers, who work however in very much roomier and better ventilated mills ; and their improved vitality, arising from another hour less in a bad atmosphere, and another hour more in a good one, would probably lead them insensibly to expend the increase of exertion required. Workers are never at their best in an ill- ventikited mill. Dr. Watts, of Manchester, says in his book on the Cotton Famine, that the Lancashire cotton operatives would always be willing to work in a well- ventilated mill for a lower rate of wages per piece, because they know they would earn more at the week's end there than in a badly- ventilated one. Cotton- weavers are comjjaratively well paid moreover, and well fed, and it is commonly among the ill-fed and weaker classes of workpeople that the higher pace of work under short hours seems to be most felt, and the response on the amount of production least complete. That may be illustrated from a recent Scotch ex- periment. Messrs. Hay and Robertson, linen weavers, of Dunfermline, tried the 54 hours week instead of 104 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. the 56| hours one for four months not long since, and were perfectly satisfied with the results to them- selves, but they returned eventually to the old hours because many of the women complained of the severity of the strain they felt in the afternoons. The day had been divided into two spells of 4^ hours each, with a single break of an hour for dinner, and the complaint was that a spell of 4|- hours was too long on end. Some of the women said they did not mind the strain, and actually earned more wages in the sliorter week ; but others could not take their breakfast immediately after rising in the morning, and working their first long spell on an empty stomach, were not able to turn out their old quantity in the morning and did not recover their form in the afternoon. The question here is one between a nine-hours day of two long spells and a nine and a half hours day of three shorter spells, and the women in this particular factory seem on the whole to have preferred the latter as less trying to their strength.^ In other cases we sometimes — not often — find work- people preferring a long and slow system of working, as a matter more of personal comfort than of health. Gas workers occasionally go back to the twelve-hours day because they like the alternation of an hour's rest with an hour's work, which it involves ; but when they adhere to the eight-hours system and still do as much work in the day as they did before, neither their health nor their spirits suffer in the least. Mr. A. Linton, ^ Labour Commission, Report on JJ'omen's Labour, p. 188. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 105 for example, states that though the gasworkers of Poplar, where he is himself employed, work harder now on the eight-hours system than they used to do on the twelve- hours one, they work freer and brisker and like it better, because it gives them more recreative time.^ That is the common, I may almost say the universal, exj)erience of the effects of shorter hours. As far as they have yet gone, more strain has been taken off b}^ diminishing the duration of labour than is put on by increasing its intensity to the degree necessary to compensate for the diminution. Messrs. Brunuer, Mond, and Co., who get about as much work from their men in 8 hours now as they used to set, before the reduction, in 12, write Messrs. Webb and Cox that " the effect on the health and physique of the men of this change has been most beneficial," and they supply some striking particulars to the Depart- mental Committee of the Home Office on the health of chemical workers. The figures of the sick club con- nected with the works show that during the summer quarter in 1889, before the introduction of the three shifts, the percentage of men who received sick pay was 7"1, while during the same quarter of 1893, after the introduction of the three shifts, the percentage was only 5*1, making a reduction of 2832 per cent. In 1889 the men attended by the doctor amounted to 10"12 per cent, of the whole, but in 1893 it was only 5*1 percent., show- ing a reduction of 49'6 per cent. Messrs. S. H. Johusun ^ Labour Commission Report, C, Qu. 25425-42. 106 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. and Co. get even more work out of their men under the eight-hours system than they ever got before, and yet declare that they are now "not only better men but better animals." ^ Mr. William Allan, M.P., of Sunderland, noticed a decided improvement in the health especially of his apprentices, before his eight- hours experiment had been a year in operation, and found his observation confirmed by asking the appren- tices themselves and their parents. The rate of mortality among miners has fallen during the last thirty years, especially between the ages of 25 and 45, so that their working years are prolonged, and though other causes have helped this result, the exertion to keep up their product has at least not hurt it or them. The late Mr. A. Macdonald, M.P., miners' agent, said he could always personally do more work in 8 hours than in 10, because there always came with more protracted work a certain loss of power in the shoulder, and he added that he could say from personal observation that the South Yorkshire miners, who as we have seen turned out as much in 8 hours as they used to do in 12, had improved greatly in physical strength since they adopted the eight-hours system.^ Indeed the rate of mortality among miners in this country observes almost a strict proportion with the customary duration of their working-day, being less in the short-hour districts than in the long-hour districts. ^ Webb and Cox, Eight Hours Day, p. 159. 2 Coal Commission Report, Qu. 4740. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 107 Mr. J. Toyn says the Cleveland iron miners work much harder while they work since they have had their hours reduced to 8 from bank to bank, but they feel the effects of their work much less. Speaking for himself, he used to be often in former times so exhausted that he had to give up work for days together in order to recover ; but that never happens now, although he is an older man. I have already mentioned and discussed the improvement in the health of the West Cumberland blast furnacemen after shorter hours.^ Visitors to Victoria are always struck with the go and energy with which the out- door labourers work, and local observers state that this ardour in work has increased since the adoption of the eight-hours day. These trades work for day wages, however, and might dawdle like other trades elsewhere if they chose without losing their weekly pay. The spirit they throw into their work seems to be spon- taneously elicited, as if work had at last become an agreeable exercise rather than an exhausting burden. But in the second place the improvement in pro- duction obtained under shorter hours is not obtained by working harder so much as by working better and more accurately. It is a fruit of the mind, of increased intelligence in working, not of increased physical exertion. For example, there is the factory mentioned by Mr. Horner, in which out of £22 worth more Avork done, £5, or only one-fourth of the increase of product, 1 A7ite, p. 92. 108 EIGHT HOUES FOE WOEK chap. was due to the increase of speed in the machinery, and £17, or three-fourths, to the better workmanship of the operatives themselves.^ Now the increase of physical exertion in this case — the increase of pace or rapidity of work — is of course set and measured by the degree of additional speed put on the machinery, and that accounts for only one-fourth of the result, the other three-fourths being the effect of more correctness and intelligence in the work. Mr. W. Glennie, an engineer, explained to the Labour Commission that the reason Messrs. Allan and Co. get as much work done in their eight- hours day as they got before in their nine-hours one is "not because the men work harder, but because they lay their mind to their work better and work more intelligently." Messrs. Johnson, of Stratford, observe that their men have become more intelligent under the eight-hours system, and the same effect of shorter hours has been frequently remarked by other employers of labour. Indeed, intelligence and method are always the great reducers of strain, the great savers of labour ; and it is ever the unskilful stroke that uses up the strength most. Some of the employers say it is impossible for human hands to go faster than they are now going in English mills. Mr. Wates, of Leicester, for example, said to the Labour Commission that he could not imagine any women workmg quicker than the women in his factory at Leicester. " Any one," he said, " who stands by our machinery from morning till 1 Ante, p. 22. Ill RESERVES OP PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 109 night, or who goes in occasionally, will see that no sooner is one lot taken off than another is put on witli the greatest possible rapidity." ^ But it is not a ques- tion of working quicker ; it is chiefly a question of working more correctly. It is a common mistake to suppose that it is im- possible for any improvement in personal efficiency to tell on the product of self-acting machinery, and that mistake is at the bottom of much of the oppo- sition of employers to the proposal of an eight-hours day. Shorter hours, they often say, may perhaps be compensated by harder exertion in some branches of industry, but where the product is the result of the revolution of machinery, an hour's less revolving must mean a jDroportional diminution in the product. " It is not possible," said a large manufacturer to the Labour Commission, " to match a machine running 9 hours a day against a foreign counterpart running 10 or 12." " In our business," said a jute spinner, " the whole goes by clockwork, and if there is a quarter of an hour of a stoppage there is a quarter of an hour's loss at the end of the week, it never can be made up." " Nothing will convince me," said a master engineer, " that a lathe in 8 hours will do the work it will in 9, if it is properly worked on both occasions." " It is quite clear," said Mr. David Dale, the chairman of one of the three sections of the Commission, in examining Mr. Tom Mann — " it is quite clear that in many branches of that trade 1 Qu. 12601-3. 110 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. (engineering), for instance, men attending machines cannot produce as much in 8 hours as in 9 " ; and Mr. Mann, himself bred an engineer, answered, " While the speed of the machinery and the capacity of the machinery remain the same, they cannot." It mvist be admitted that nothing does seem clearer before we examine into the facts than that such a thing is impossible, but nothing is better established by the facts than that it is done constantly every day. What can be nearer clockwork than a textile mill ? — yet the Ten Hours Act stopped this clockwork in every mill in the country for 11 hours a week without making any material difference in its weekly product. In some mills the machinery was neither changed nor speeded, and yet it gave out the same quantity in 10 hours it used to do in 12, in consequence of nothing but the improved personal exertion of the workpeople ; and in all the rest, while some small part of this result was due to increasing the speed of the machinery, much the greatest part was due to that same personal improvement, as I have shown in the opening of this chapter from the experience both of this country and of Switzerland. What occurred in every textile mill of England in 1848 is exactly what textile manu- facturers are still assuring the Labour Commission to be an impossibility. Mr. Chamberlain in his business, as we have seen, found the same workmen with the same automatic machinery turning out more screws per hour after their day was shortened than they turned in RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 111 out before. M. Freese mentions a similar result from the circular saws and fluting planes of his blind factory. In that very engineering industry in which Mr. Dale and Mr. Mann think such a result impossible, Mr. Allan's manager at Sunderland discovered, as he says to his great surprise, that the same men with the same machines produced as much and even more in 8 hours than they used to do in 9. And an eminent Enoflish iron manufacturer, who has tried in vain to get his men to adopt the eight-hours system, Mr. William Whitwell, stated to the Commission explicitly that " there may be two machines identically the same, and their results may be entirely different owing to the want of ability and push on the part of the man work- ing one particular machine." Our first false impressions on this subject, in which so many of us remain, come from simply failing to observe two things : first, that with the most automatic machinery in common use there is always plenty of room for the " ability and push " of the workman, of which Mr. Whitwell speaks, to tell decisively on the result ; and second, that the short-hour workman is a being of more push and ability than the long-hour workman. Machines no doubt differ widely in the degree in which they dispense with personal supervision. After the Ten Hours Act it was found easier to make up the old product at the loom than at the spindles or the carding machine. But it was soon done even in spinning. Already in 1849 Mr. Horner mentions a 112 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. case (Cotton Mill L) where, though there was a con- siderable reduction at first, the difference was made up to some extent before the year was out at the self- acting mules as well as in the weaving ; and chiefly he explains by the people sticking closer to their work. It must be remembered that there are many occasions of stoppage with the best machinery — to repair accidents, to knot broken threads, to take off work or to put work en — and every stoppage furnishes an opportunity for a bad workman to lose time and a good workman to save it. The one may stop the clockwork a quarter of an hour when the other would not stop it two minutes, and, as the jute manufacturer I have quoted says, if there is a quarter of an hour of a stoppa,ge, there is a quarter of an hour's loss at the end of the week. In the engineer- ing trade Mr. Wigram, of the eminent firm of Messrs. Fowler, of Leeds, informed the Labour Commission that as much as a fourth or a fifth of the whole working-day of machine-minders was occupied in putting work on the machine or taking work off. The English oper- ative wastes much less time of the machine over these incidents than any Continental operative, and wasting less time of the machine is of course equivalent to adding to its product, the addition being proportioned not only to the time saved but also to the size and power or general productive capacity of the machine. In this way the introduction of machinery, instead of neutralising the personal superiorities of the workman, really multiplies their value by the amount of its own pro- Ill EESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 113 ductive capacity, and I shall have occasion to enter with more detail into a comparison of English with French labour, which will show that while in branches of labour using no machinery three Englishmen will do the work of four and in some cases of six Frenchmen, in branches of labour like the cotton manufacture, in which machinery is largely used, three Englishmen do the work of nine Frenchmen. The personal factor really counts for more in machine work than in mere hand work, and if shortening the daily span improves the push or ability of the personal factor, that improve- ment will tell more on the product of the machine than on the product of the hand, because there is much more product to tell on. It may be true enough that a lathe will not do as much work in 8 hours as it will in nine, if it is proiKvly worked on hoth occasions ; but the employer who made that statement, and thought it so conclusive against the eight-hours day, did not realise in the least the great practical importance of the conditional clause in his sentence. The eight-hours workman will necessarily work it better than the nine- hours one, and the difference in the result may be really very considerable. Then it ought to be remembered that however much machinery a work may employ it always requires a body of auxiliary labour in which machinery is less used. I have just mentioned carding as a process in which difficulty has been sometimes found in recovering the old rate of production after shortening the hours of labour. But Messrs. Holden, I 114 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. of Bradford, the largest wool -combers in the world, who have mills in France running 72 hours a week, and mills in England running only 56, find they can comb wool cheaper in England than in France, though they pay higher wages for the short day of England than for the long day of France, and employ exactly the same automatic machinery in both countries ; and one of the reasons, they told Sir Jacob Behrens, was that it was not the people employed on the combing machine itself, but the great number of other workpeople employed in different ways on the premises who do not give for the same money anything like the same amount of labour as workpeople in England.^ There is thus plenty of play for the personal variation of energy and intelligence even in connection with the most rigidly automatic machine labour. In the third place there are many industries in which the improvement in productive capacity per hour comes, as I have said, from merely hauling in slack, from the abolition of the old habit of working by fits and starts, or of sheer dawdling, or of other irregularities. I have already given some illustrations of the habit of idling the first half of the week and overworking the second, which was still in 1862, as expressly stated in the Report of the Children's Employment Com- missioners, the invariable characteristic of the small workshops and the domestic industries. The restriction of hours by the Factory Act of 1867 did much to 1 Trade Depression Commission Report, Qu. 6754. Ill EESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 115 remove that evil. When men were no longer allowed to make up for lost time by overwork, they ceased losing time, and so much more was produced in the week than before that a manufacturer told Mr. Redgrave in 1876 his men then earned a shilling a week more in their shorter hours than they did in 1867 when working 13 and 14 hours a day.^ Trades that habitually work overtime still habitually waste a day or two in the week. Sartorius von Waltershausen was told in the Public Ledger Office, Philadelphia, that when the printers wrought 14 hours a day they seldom wrought more than 4 or 5 days in the week, or if they wrought several weeks consecutively without intermission they needed a longer period of rest. When the potteries came under the Factory Acts in 1864, 10 or 12 hours were taken off their working week; in Worcester, for example, I observe from the " Miscellaneous Statistics " the hours were 62 in 1863 and only 50 in 1866; and the factory inspector states that many of the manu- facturers said the workpeople did quite as much in the day as they ever did, all on account of the greater regularity with which they wrought. They were formerly in the habit of drinking two days in the week and making up their task by working very long in some of the other four. One of the best, though undesigned, effects of our factory legislation has been the checking of this fatal habit, and the factory inspector remarks with great justice in his report for ^ Factory hisiJcctor' s Report, 1877, p. 13. I 2 116 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. 1872, that " if our labour laws had done no other good than to place obstacles in the way of this inclination on the part of many of our manufacturing population to waste and worse than waste a day or two in the early part of each week, the originators of these laws would have deserved the gratitude of all who have the real interests of their country at heart." But besides reducing the interruptions of work in the course of the week, short hours have also reduced the interruptions in the course of the day and in the course of the year. They brought with them greater promptitude and punctuality in beginning work in the morning, partly because the masters, since their works ran shorter time in the day, felt they must have a better use of the time that remained, and partly because the men themselves returned from their longer rest with more zest and heart for their work. Several American manufacturers indeed state that when they ran their works 8 hours a day in dull times their men were not so prompt in the morning as they were when working 10 hours in better times ; but in slack times the energies of the masters themselves might also be slacker, and a temporary acquisition of leisure is some- times mis-spent so as to necessitate unpunctuality in the morning. The general experience is certainly, as might be expected, the other way. Short hours carry with them general habits of briskness, which are com- municative, and soon pervade the whole establishment. Work is more continuous during the whole day. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 117 Messrs. Watts and Manton, button-makers, Birming- ham, said after the shortening of their hours, " Every moment is employed,, there is no waste of time in tlie process, no running of short errands ; the habits of the people are changing." In some trades much of the time of the day used to be taken up merely in waiting for work, and tliat time was, after the Act of 1867, saved for actual work. A female bookbinder said to the Factory Inspector in 1876, "The work is now given out during the day in the factory more regularly and more promptly, and we never lose time waiting for it as we used to do. I find I can earn more money under the Factory Act than when we had no regulations, and in book-sewing we are all paid by piece-work." Com- plaints of this kind of unnecessary waiting for orders or for materials were laid before the Labour Com- mission by some of the Sheffield trades. The "makers up " in the Britannia metal trade — a class comprising three-fourths of the persons engaged in the industry — are said to spend not less than a third of their whole time, or about two days a week, in merely waiting in this way for orders or materials without any reason except the dilatory or indolent habits of management of those they work for. Shorter hours generally cure this evil, and sometimes raise the amount of the week's production into the bargain, by merely compelling em- ployers into greater regularity, just as in some instances the railways had done. The old carriers would wait for goods till midnight and even longer, and in those 118 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. days the hosiery warehousemen of Leicester would be kept at work very late making up packages for the carriers. But the railway train would not wait, and the Leicester warehouses simply submitted to more regular and shorter hours, because their easy-going habits were no longer humoured. Even in trades where the irregularities of the workhours have come from the dilatoriness of customers in sending orders or from the exigencies of the seasons, greater regularity has generally resulted from a shortening of the day. Orders arrived in better time, and the work was better distributed through the year. Then some portions of the day. though not lost, were imperfectly used. Both Mr. Beaufoy and Messrs. Johnson and Go. attribute much of the success of their eight-hour experiments to dividing the day into two spells instead of three. You get thus, to use Mr. Beaufoy 's phrase, a " solid eight-hour day." Messrs Johnson say, " Every break means practically a quarter of an hour lost time, getting ready for going and getting ready for work on returning." ^ Then, as both mention, another important thing is that the first spell is done after breakfast instead of being done on an empty stomach. This again has been found an important advantage by Mr. Allan and Mr. Mather as supplying the men with more energy for their work, though some employers seem to think that many of the workpeople will come without breakfast from being unable to take 1 Webb and Cox, Eight Hour Day, p. 258. Ill EESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 119 it so soon after rising. Messrs. Johnson found 50 per cent, more work done in the morning under the new arrangements than was done before. The mere ab- senteeism in the morning under the old system was a serious loss ; Mr. Allan said it was so great that really his men never used to work more than 48 hours a week on the average. But now the attendance could not be more regular, and as Mr. Allan recently told a newspaper interviewer, even on the morning of the 3rd of January 1894, the first day after the New Year holidays, every man and boy was at his place in the shop. Not one was absent. Under the old system, he said, that never happened at all. This fact seems to indicate not merely better habits of early rising, but better habits of spending the New Year holidays. The Hadfield Steel Foundry Co., by shortening their hours, reduced their absenteeism in the morning from 20 per cent, to 4 per cent. Again, under long-hour systems there is always, in the course of the year, a great deal of time lost through sickness and other causes of inattendance, which shorter hours tend to reduce. The manager of a cotton mill (F) told Mr. Horner in 1848 that there was already much less sickness among the workpeople, and many fewer off work since the Ten Hours Act came into operation. A firm of plain and fancy box-makers told Mr. Eedgrave in 1876 that when they used to work long hours before the Factory and Workshops Act of 1867, " it was very common for some of the women and girls employed to have fits, and of a bad kind ; and we 120 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. think we may venture to say that this has not happened once a year since the Act came into force." ^ I have mentioned the case of the West Cumberland blast-fur- nace-men, who, after the reduction of their hours from 12 to 8, improved so much in health, tliat a number of the casual hands were now spared, who had been retained mainly to take the furnacemen's place when, absent, though jobs of some other kind were given them in the meanwhile. Then besides the interruptions from sickness, there were also under the longf- hours system more interruptions of work throughout the year from the mere necessity of change or rest. The Hon, W. Gray says the effect of introducing the ten- hours day into the Atlantic mills was that there was a more continuous and uninterrupted work throughout the year than before. " Usually in the hottest of the summer weather it is very difficult to retain the operatives in the mill. They become oppressed with the heat, and they prepare to go out for a turn of vacation, recreation, &c., and we have been subject to that as well as other mills, but we have found in the last two summers hardly any of our machinery idle for want of operatives. There have been cases of other mills at Lawrence where a thousand looms were standing idle in one corporation, though they pay a higher price than is paid at the Atlantic mill. It is not a question of wages." ^ To prevent a mill from stopping 1 Factory Lispedor's Report, 1877, p 17. 2 Massachusetts Labour Bureau, Report for 1S73. in RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 121 through these irregularities there is in every factory town of America a special class of supernumerary opera- tives, whose business is to " work sick," as it is called, and Mr, Harris-Gastrell says you would usually see eight or ten of them about the door of a mill in Fall River waiting for an engagement, in the event of any of the looms being idle for the day.^ In Russia, another long-hour country, every factory is obliged to retain a regular staff of supernumerary hands, who have learnt the trade, in order merely to supply vacant places arising from temporary inattendance. Men need leisure, and if they are not granted it, nature will evidently take her revenge by wasting in the end more genuine workino' time than the length of the relaxation she is denied. To all these diverse economies of time we have still to add the saving of the time spent in repairing spoiled work, caused through excessive hours, and of the time sometimes wilfully wasted through ill-feeling arising from the same source. Mr. Thomasson, of Bolton, we are told by Lord Shaftesbury, used to say there was more spoiled worked done in the last hour of the twelve-hours day than in any other two hours ; and a manager said to Mr. Horner that it generally took the first hour of the day to put to rights the things that had been done wrong in the last hour of the preceding day. The mere saving of materials in cases like these ^ Harris Gastrell's Eeport to Foreign Office in 1873 on the Factory System of the United States, p. 509. 122 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. is of course very important, for the price of raw material constitutes constantly a larger and larger share of the value of commodities, as compared with the price of labour, and a little less Avaste of raw materials every day will soon tell on the profitableness of the business. When we add to it the saving in gas and fuel, and in the yearly expenditure on repairs of machinery, arising from the greater care which employers admit is bestowed on the machinery by the men under a short-hour system, the whole economy amounts to a very consider- able gain. But at present I am speaking merely of the savins: of effective working time, and the time wasted in avoidable repairs of bad work is one item worthy of attention. Then think of the time intentionally wasted, Mr. Spill, an india-rubber manufacturer, informed the Children's Emj)loyment Commission that he found working overtime extremely unprofitable, because his men used to loiter over their work in the regular hours in order to get better pay for it by doing it during overtime.^ A working engineer in Massachusetts, who had been seventeen years with the master he then worked for, said they wrought 11 hours a day in his establishment for the same wages got in neighbouring shops for 10 hours a day, and added that he was satis- fied the master had made nothing by his extra hour, because the best workmen used to leave as soon as times got brisker, and he was obliged therefore in good ^ Fourth Report, xxvii. in RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 123 times to put up with an inferior class of workmen, who had to get the pay of good workmen, and who gave their work rekictantly. " The prevailing feeling among his men towards him [he says] is similar to that generally entertained towards a farmer or trader who always asks a little more than a fair j)i'ice for everything he offers for sale, and this feeling crops up almost every day as oppor- tunity offers of shirking with the remark, ' I must get my hour somehow/ The apprentice feels that he ' gouges ' an hour out of him and acts accordingly, and this too in face of the fact that in many respects he is a good man to work for. The hands brood over these things as a personal wrong, and it tells against their faithfulness." ^ As compared with the effect of 11 hours' brooding of this sort every day, the effect of an hour more or an hour less on the product would evidently be very small. The world takes a long time to appreciate adequately the enormous productive value of mere contentment and cheerfulness of mind — it is only the other day that the sharpest people on earth still thought slave labour profitable. Dr. Ure once asked a leading manufacturer why he paid such a high rate of wages as compeared with his neighbours, and the answer was : — " We find a moderate saving- in the wages to be of little consequence in comparison of contentment, and we therefore keep them as high as we can possibly ^ Massachiisetts Labour Bureau Report, 1872, p. 243. 124 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. aflford, in order to be entitled to the best quality of work. A spinner reckons the charge of a pair of mules in our factory a fortune for life ; he will therefore do his utmost to retain his situation and to uphold the high character of our yarns." ^ If contentment makes so great a difference on so automatic a mechanical operation as mule-spinning, what must not be its influence on more exclusively personal industrial operations ? Now, one of the first and most marked effects of shortening hours, has been the greater satisfaction and cheerfulness which the labourers feel in their work. They come back to it in the morning with a new spring and relish, and they leave in the evening with hope and spirit, Mr. Baker reported in 1870 that masters wrote him of the advantage they had reaped from the reduction of hours enforced by the Act of 1867, and that the men earned as much, if not more, wages, and did better work than under the old regime of long and variable hours, and he quotes one of them as saying : — " It does one good these summer mornings to see the quiet of our streets at 5.55, so soon after teeming with life. The workers seem more joyous than ever I remember them at closing time during the last twenty years. You would be gratified if you heard the en- comiums passed on the 6 o'clock movement (the new day was 8 to 6). It is changing the habits of the working population entirely. I often stand at about ^ Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 366. in KESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 125 6 P.M. on the steps of our warehouse entrance watching the crowds go by in the full light of the sun, not as formerly just when it was setting, and they wearied and spiritless." ^ Mr. Horner says many of the working people spoke to him of " the satisfaction of mind that resulted from the short day," and Mr. J. C Proudfoot, a joiner in Glasgow, told the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives in 1860 regarding the Saturday half-holiday which had recently become a general custom in that city, that quite as much work was done as before, because the men got a sail down the Clyde on the Saturday afternoon, and had " more pleasure in their work." ^ The cheerful mind carries a spontaneous vigour into labour, and dispenses with much of the necessity for constant superintendence and goading. English travel- lers often speak now of the " go " and energy they observe in the 8 hour V^ictorian labourer, as compared with the English labourer, very much as Mr. Laing and other travellers used to speak of the energy visible in the English labourer as compared with the continental. There is no languor and dawdling, even though the master's eye may not be upon him. This in a large establishment is worth far more to the product than an hour longer in the day. " Skill in management, and thoroughness in discipline," said the manager of an American factory, " are more important than the eleventh hour to the product of a mill, and thorough ^ Factory Inspector's Report, 1870, p. 44. - Qu. 2904-5. 126 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. discipline is much more attainable under 10 hours than under 11 hours. For men and women are flesh and blood, and cannot be held up to such steady work during 11 hours as during 10, and overseers are flesh and blood, and cannot hold them up." ^ But perhaps the chief increment of industrial efficiency in the English labourer will come from the better cultivation of his intelligence, the only point at present in which he stands at a disadvantage in comparison with some of his rivals. This raises the very important, and to many minds anxious and per- plexing, question. Will the English labourer use any further leisure he may acquire for the improvement of his mind by reading and study and not for the destruc- tion of his body by drink and dissipation ? Experience, as far as I have been able to follow it, lends the strongest encouragement to the hope that he will use it as a rule for his improvement. In the first place, generally speaking, we have now been going on shortening hours for half a century and all the time our workpeople have been growing in temperance and health and intelligence and efiiciency. The British workman used to be notorious beyond all others for his drunken and irregular habits, but though he has received ever and anon more time to indulge those habits if he chose, lie has not grown worse but grown better. The testimony of employers at the Labour Commission was uniform and decided on this point ^ Massachusetts Report on Uniform Hours of Labo^ir, p. 142. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 127 The shortening of the hours has of itself, as I have ah-eady shown, suppressed in many trades those habitu- ally irregular habits of working, which had much to do with the other irregularities of his life, and though it has no doubt given to certain individuals increased opportunities of ill-doing which they have used to their hurt, the general effect has been the other way. Some- times the effect is sg^id to have been good on the educated but bad on the illiterate. When the eight- hours day was first introduced among the South Yorkshire miners, Mr. Normansell says the unedu- cated spent their time drinking, but the educated used it properly, and when it was introduced into the Rock Island Arsenal, U.S.A, the Commandant reported that the skilled workmen were improved by it and the unskilled injured. The Education Act has in this country taken away that predisposing condition of abuse, and the miner is a changed man from what he was thirty or forty years ago. Mr. J. P. White, a coal-owner at Coalville, says that when he began business thirty-nine years ago, the miner was " altogether a different individual " from his successor of to-day. The miner of to-day, he says, " takes an interest in parochial matters and attends his place of worship; and if there is any question such as technical education which is now cropping up he gives a very fair attendance at the village school and takes an interest in it in that way." ^ The Northumberland * Labour Commission lleport, A. Qii. 7258. 128 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chav miners, who work about the shortest hours, are credited with being the most sober and steady class of miners in the whole country. Mr. E. Young and Mr. J. Nixon said they had often been told so by the coal-owners as a body. How then, it was asked, do they spend their leisure ? " They attend reading- rooms ; they have a mechanics' institute at every colliery, I should say ; and as I said before, they are nearly all members of co-operative societies and they are interested in seeing those societies successfully carried on. Then some of them no doubt take an interest in sports of different sorts just like other people." Mr, Young- added that they had science and art classes in a considerable number of the colliery villages of North- umberland, that they had University extension lectures largely attended, and that there was a higher percent- age of honours won by miners at the examinations in connection with these classes and lectures than the average.-^ The chief complaints brought before the Labour Commission against the present generation of colliers came from Lancashire, where the hours happen to be comparatively long, and where the colliers are alleged to be growing worse and worse for the number of play- days they take. Shorter hours might prove the remedy for this. Mr. T. Griffiths told the Coal Com- mission of 1873, that since the South Staffordshire miners got their hours reduced in 1872 from 66 to 48 1 A. Qu. 2292-96. m RESERVES OF PERSONAL P:FFICIENCY 129 in the week, tliey were working with much more regu- larity, and neither wanted nor took so many days play. Employers often used to assert that the longer leisure in the evening would only lead the workmen to visit the public-house before going home, but ex- perience has shown the tendency to be precisely the opposite. Messrs. Watts and Manton say, " The habits of the people are changing ; there is a greater desire for home life, and greater longing after the means by which it is to be rendered more agreeable." ^ Mr. Johnston, flax-spinner and ex-Mayor of Belfast, says that under the long hours the boys used to lounge about the street corners and frequent the public-houses, but since the hours were shortened they attended reading-rooms in large numbers, and when tired of reading would amuse themselves with games. Mr. C. Wilson, manufacturer, Hawick, told the Labour Com- mission that his men had been using their leisure wisely, and had improved during the years they have now enjoyed it. Among other things they had used it for the cultivation of allotments, and took great interest in vying with one another who should produce the best fruit and vegetables.^ A year after the enforce- ment of the Act of 1867 the factory inspector makes the general statement, " Assuredly the usefulness of the first hours of rational freedom from late employ- ment has not been overrated. The power which the 1 Qu. 5970-2. - Factory Report for 1870, p. 44. 3 Labov,r Commission, C. 7682, 7686. K 130 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. working classes now possess of making arrangements for outdoor enjoyments in the summer and for in- tellectual advancement of every kind during the winter months is fully appreciated, and would be most reluctantly parted with."^ Since the eight-hours system was introduced into London gasworks it had been observed, said Mr. A. Linton to the Labour Commission, in two different friendly societies which dealt with stokers, that the claims for sick pay had declined, and he added that the general condition and habits of the class had improved. " It was at one time something exceptional to see a man who was not to a certain extent degraded by drink ; directly work was over men went to a public- house and stayed there for hours. Since the Gas- workers' Union had come into existence they had been taught to become temperate men, and in a great many instances teetotalers, and so made the conditions better, both as regards themselves, their wives, families, and homes," ^ The experience of foreign countries on this head is identical with that of England. Before the eleven-hours Act was passed in Switzerland, it was generally pro- phesied that the time gained from the mills would only be given to the public-houses, but M. Blocher, a Swiss cotton manufacturer, says expressly that he has remarked nothing like that, and that it was always when his men wrought day and night that he used to see most dissipa- 1 Factory Report, 1868, p, 277. ' C. Qu. 25453-9. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 131 tion, Sliorter hours had brought with them stricter discipline, and diligence rose to a higher maximum than before.^ It was really only the shorter day that first gave our workpeople either time or spirit for any other recreation than the ready but dangerous ones supplied in the public-house. In trades in which the burden of the long hours was unusually severe, the removal of that burden wrought an immediate change, and the men seemed to recover in a moment their natural temperance, lost solely under overwork. The reduction of the hours of the West Cumberland blast furnacemen from 12 to 8 in the day increased the membership of the local temperance societies by 50 per cent., and Messrs. Brunner, Mond and Co. state explicitly of a similar reduction made in their works, " To the men it has been the greatest boon. It has had the most material effect in improving their health and decreasing the amount of drunkenness which before the adoption of the system was very great indeed. The interference of the police is not called for now as it used to be." ^ Messrs. Johnson of Stratford, after four years' experience of the eight-hours system, say that they have now a more intelligent set of men, and that the men and lads have come, in consequence of their greater leisure, to improve themselves by attending technical classes in the evening:.^ One of Mr. Allan's ^ Beviie d' Economic politique for 1891, p. 860. ' Hadfield and Gibbins, A Shorter Working Day, p. 141. '' Ibid. p. 140. K 2 132 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. apprentices at Sunderland opened the situation very well when he told the correspondent of the Newcastle Chronicle tljat the great benefit of the eight-hours day to him was that it let him attend evening classes without necessitating any curtailment of sleep. I have already mentioned the experience of Messrs. Bush ill and Sons, Coventry, that their employes have manifested a striking and increasing dislike to working overtime since their ordinary work hours have been shortened. Their leisure is much more valued, simply because it is really much more useful ; it is now long enough to do something in and to be worth while making plans for its better employment. But Mr. Bush ill has still more pleasing experiences to record as to the effect of greater leisure in positively stimu- lating plans for its own improvement. His firm employs 250 hands, and they have observed no tendency among them to abuse their leisure. " As far as we can tell," says Mr. Bushill, " the extra leisure is well spent," and they would have certainly soon been able to tell if any number of their people were spending it ill. On the contrary, they have had a remarkable proof that many of their men are using it in the most profitable way. They have started a book club and are buying books at the rate of 600 a year. Mr. Bushill writes me : " Soon after this reduction of hours was made, one of the men came to the writer and said that, as they had more time in the evenings to themselves, he thought Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 133 that many would like to buy books to read. A pro- posal for a book club to be maintained by weekly contributions from voluntary members was submitted to the Works' Commitee and heartily approved. At the close of the first year over 600 volumes were distributed, and it is anticipated that quite 1,000 volumes will be bought next Christmas. The great bulk of these books, it is certain, would not have been purchased but for this reduction of hours. Here is an interesting suggestion of how, in dealing with one industrial question, the alleviation of another may be assisted. These thousand volumes represent so much work for the paper-maker, the printer and the binder, and thus 'shorter hours' have tended to benefit the unemployed." The first effect of the Ten Hours Act in England was to develop an immediate and very remarkable fervour for mental improvement. Dean Hook wrote Lord Shaftesbury in 1849, that fifty night schools had been opened in Leeds since the passing of the Ten Hours Act the year before. The timekeeper of a Lancashire mill told Mr. Horner that in the night school in wliich he was a teacher the number of pupils immediately increased from twenty to fifty when the Act passed, and added, " I find, likewise, it has given more taste for reading ; there is more inquiry for books from the librarian." ^ Mill managers mentioned that far more of their young women went to night schools than formerly, ^ Factory Inspector's Report, 1849, p. 50. 134 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. and that in some places they met together in the evening to sew and read. It became a general practice to have a night school in a mill, the owner giving the room and light gratis, and the school was usually conducted by the factory hands themselves on the mutual principle, the man who had mastered arithmetic being set to teach the man who had only mastered grammar, and vice vcrsd. The fee was a penny a night, and sometimes threepence for two nights. The manager of a cotton mill says : — " I think the workpeople in the mill feel the benefit of the Ten Hours Bill in the increased facility afforded to them for gaining instruction and information. They have established a night school among themselves, for which the master lends them a room in the mill, fur- nished with desks, forms, &c., and supplied with fire and light. There are a library and excellent maps in it, and in time they hope to procure globes. The system is one of mutual instruction, which the hands prefer to any other. The engineer is superintendent, and he is assisted by three or four others, who take the chief part in the teaching. They meet from 6.80 to 8, and some- times continue later. Alternate nights are set apart for males and females. Both attend two nights in the week. The ages of the males, speaking generally, vary from eleven to eighteen ; those of the females from eleven to thirty -two. There are married people of both sexes who also attend. Out of 120 hands in the mill about fifty come regularly, twenty males and thirty Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 135 females. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography are at present taught. Instruction in the higher branches of knowledge will be given as the people are fitted for it," The engineer supplemented this testimony by saying they had also two libraries in the mill, a free and a subscription one, the subscription one having eighteen subscribers.^ In another mill, two young men, not content with their two nights in the mill night school, started another night school of their own for other three nights in the week. They paid three halfpence a week for light and fire, and imjjosed a fine of a halfpenny for absence or swearing. Sometimes father and son sat side by side m the same class. A carder said to Mr. Horner, " I come to this night school once or twice a week and bring three of my children." In fact, it was this educational advantage often that reconciled the father of a family to the serious reduction of wages that accompanied the introduction of the Ten Hours Act. While we find one workman with twelve children saying he would like to go back to the twelve-hours day, having twelve good reasons for doing so, we find another with quite as large a family, but some of them old enough to be at work in the mill, saying he much preferred the ten-hours day for the sake of his children, because it gave them a chance of fitting themselves better for the world. This was no merely local movement. Night schools ' Factory Inspector's Report, 1849, p. 57. 136 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. were reported to be increasing in Manchester just as in Leeds ; at Blackbnrn they were said to be springing up on all sides ; at Bolton and Stockport the number of hands attending night schools and mechanics' institutes had nearly doubled since the Act passed ; at Preston there were 250 females attending the night school in Gardner's factory, and 104 of the 270 hands were at the night school in Horrocks's ; at Keighley the mem- bership of the Mechanics' Institute rose from 200 to 400, and 156 young people were attending classes two nights a week, which, the inspector states, would be all stopped if the hours of labour were to be increased again, as was then sometimes suggested, to eleven. The shorter hours, therefore, by the mere fact of giving time for learning, which working people never before enjoyed, undoubtedly quickened among them the desire for learning in a very general and remarkable way, and served so far to create the very mental habits Avhich were required for drawing the full industrial benefit from the change. The present generation is much more generally educated than the generation of 1848, and cannot be supposed to be any less desirous or less capable of finding ways of using their leisure, if they get it, for their further improvement. If we are justified in expecting the gift of leisure to spread an active desire for mental improvement, we are even better justified in expecting this spread of mental improvement to result in very substantial gains m in- dustrial efficiency. We have seen employers remarking iii RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY Is: a certain quickening of the intelligence in their men immediately after the shortening of their working-day. The faculties, which seem to have been somewhat torpid and wandering under the long hours, concentrated them- selves with more purpose and interest in their work and produced better results. But I speak now of the in- crease of intelligence to be expected from the larger opportunities for mental instruction afforded by the shorter day. We have begun to grow alive to the value of technical education, but for the ordinary workman the fruitful thing is general education. Sir William Fairbairu, the engineer, told the Poor Law Commissioners that the more difficult jDarts of a work could not be trusted to any but a well-educated man. There were many kinds of manual work that needed a good deal of thinking and planning, and were really as much work of the head as of the hand, and for that sort of work education was an obvious advan- tage. Then operations in engineering work were very manifold, and a great difference was always observable between the educated man and the uneducated in changing from one sort of operation to another. The latter had nothing like the versatility of the former. It required a certain school education, said Sir William, to make a man capable of doing each of a succession of different operations in the best way. " Why is it," asked Colonel Barrows, the manager of the Willimantic Thread Co., of Connecticut, of an English traveller, Mr. D. Pidgeon, — " why is it that the Willimantic thread 138 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. will lift more ounces of dead weight and is smoother than any other ? Every manufacturer can buy the same cotton and the same sort of macliinery to work it ; why then the superiority of our products ? Simply because they are made by people who know more tlian any other people in the world engaged in the same work. They put more brains into their work than others do. They are intelligent enough to know the value of care, intelligent enough to be conscientious about employing it, and intelligent enough to know how best to apply it with skill to produce the best results. That is why it pays us directly to increase their knowledge."^ This factory has its reading-room and library to improve the mind which improves the thread and gives the Willimantic Company the com- mand of the market, and the work-room is a vast hall, 200 feet high, lit by stained-glass windows, and bright all round, as on a festival day, with creeping plants, geraniums, and flowering shrubs, growing up alongside the walls. In the centre the 3"oung spinsters at the frames are no slatternly mill hands, but are neatly dressed in a uniform white linen apron, and present a very tidy and tasteful appearance. And all because, in the opinion of the enlightened and even philosophic manager of the company — to use his own words — " the very intelligence by which ' our thread owes its superiority is fostered almost as much by cleanliness, order, and beauty as by education itself." ' Pidgeon, Old World Questions aiid New World Answers, p. 219. Ill RESERVES OF PERSONAL EFFICIENCY 139 Americans have long understood the industrial value of schooling in their workpeople. It is more than forty years since Mr. Peshine Smith, the American economist, said it was commonly considered in the United States, where there are unrivalled opportunities of seeing American and foreign labour working side by side, that the superior intelligence of American opera- tives was an advantage of fully 20 per cent, to the American manufacturer. In order to test the influence of education on efficiency, the Massachusetts Education Board about the same period procured from factory overseers in that State a return of the different amounts of wages earned by their different workers, and of the degree of education of the respective earners, and the return showed that the scale besfan at the bottom with those foreigners Avho made a mark as a signature to their weekly receipts for wages, and rose grade by grade to the girls who attended school in the winter and worked in the factories in summer. They all wrought by the piece, and the sums they severally earned, and consequently the work they had severally done, was in exact proportion to the degree of their education.^ Professor Ely, of Baltimore, says that it has been ascertained that with no noteworthy ex- ception the higher in any district of the United States the "per capita expenditure for schools the higher is the average of wages, and therefore by implication the higher the production of wealth. The industrial ^ E. Peshine Smith, Manual of PuUtical Economy, j). 107. 140 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. advantage of education is shown again in the fact that the educated workman responds better to a stimulus like piece-work. It has been shown, for example, by Professor Roscher, from the difference between the day-wages and piece-wages of rural labourers in the different States of Germany, that the labourers in the well-educated States gave a higher increase of return under piece-work than the labourers in the worse educated States. Then, for want of sufficient educa- tion in rural labourers, Mr. Hearn points out that many new agricultural machines remain practically un- used ; for want of training of hand and eye, Mr. Nasmyth says, most workmen waste two-thirds of their time in testing their work with the square and the straight- edge, which the dexterous workman seldom uses ; and for want of a more general possession of leisure and education among the working classes we probably lose many useful inventions every year, for Mr. Denny, of Dumbarton, instituted an award scheme m his yard in 1880 for recompensing improvements in machinery or methods suggested by the workpeople, and after six years said the scheme had converted his men into thinking and planning beings, and that 196 awards had been actually given, and three times as many proposals had been considered. The American workman has been long a great inventor, partly because he has been well educated, partly because the patent laws of the great republic make registration cheap and easy, and partly because Ill EESEilVES OF PERSONAL EFFICtENCY 141 the opinion of the workshop, which is so often adverse to new inventions in other countries, is generally favourable to them in America, the workpeople under- standing well that it is only by constantly improving the methods of production that any country can under modern competition keep or extend its command of the markets of the world. The future progress of society will depend much on this constant imj)rove- ment in the methods of production, and that is a work in which a well-educated and comparatively leisured labouring class can be reasonably expected to play an important part. CHAPTER IV THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AND FOREIGN COMPETITION It is commonly assumed that an eight-hours day must necessarily tell ill on the position of England in competition with other nations, merely because it is commonly assumed that an eight-hours day must necessarily raise the cost of production. But there is nothing to justify that assumption either in our ex- perience of past reductions of the hours of labour or in our recent trials of the eight-hours day itself It is not disputed that we have produced as cheaply in 10 hours as in 12, and that we have produced as cheaply in 9 hours as in 10, mainly, and in some cases solely, because shortening the work-hours improved the productive energy of the workpeople to such a degree that they were able to turn out as much work in the shorter day as in the longer. There is no sound reason why the same result should not flow again from the same cause, for the personal improvability of even the best of our workpeople is far from being exhausted. In counting up the cost of shorter hours, employers are apt to leave CH. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 143 this important item out of the reckouirig. Manufacturers of the highest position came before the Labour Com- mission and stated that they had gone very minutely into this question of cost, that there was so much for interest on buildings and machinery, so much for general management, so much for Avagos, that since the machinery would run 11 per cent, shorter time there would be 11 percent, less product, that when the stand- ing charges were distributed over the smaller product there would be much more than 11 per cent, added to the expense of production, and that they saw no chance of making a profit at home or competing with the foreigner abroad, and would transfer their mills to the banks of the Indus. They simply ignored the great asset which paid the whole cost of the Ten Hours Act, just as Cobden ignored it when he said that Act would stop every engine in the country, and Mark Phillips, when he declared he would sell off his mills in Lancashire and set them up across the Channel. It is of course impossible to give an exact estimate beforehand of the degree in which the personal efficiency of English labour will be improved by a further re- duction of hours, or the degree in which that improve- ment will tell on production. That can only be known by experiment, and the experiments that have been already made go far to show that the fund which paid the cost of the ten-hours day is still sufficient to pay the cost of the eight- hours one. They go to show that under the eight-hours system men work with so much 144 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap, more energy and concentration while they work that they turn out as great a quantity, and sometimes even more than they did under the nine-hours or ten-hours system, and are less exhausted at the finish, for they are ex- pressly stated to be in better health and spirits. Still, even successful experiment seems inadequate to over- come the obstinate preconceptions and incredulity that prevail on the subject. After the Labour Commission received explicit evi- dence of the eight-hours system being actually tried in shipbuilding by Messrs. Short, and in engineering by Mr. W. Allan, M.P., with the result in both cases of a positive increase of product and a positive diminution of cost, they were quite as explicitly assured by leading employers in the same branches of industry that an eight-hours day was utterly beyond the range of practical discussion, and that it would render it impossible for English engineers to compete with foreign engineers. But the antecedent opinions of even the largest and most experienced employers cannot be set in the scale against actual experiment, and the teaching of experi- ment, as far as it has yet gone, seems certainly to indi- cate that an eight-hours day will strengthen us against foreign competition rather than otherwise, because it will strengthen that precise factor in production by which our industrial supremacy has been principally maintained, and on which apparently it must altogether depend in the future — viz., the high industrial energy of GUI" workpeople. IV FOEEIGN COMPETITION 145 The industrial competition of the nations is fast becoming a mere contest in the jDersonal productive capacity of their labourers. The other conditions of the strife are getting equalised. Cheap and rapid transport is now levelling the advantages one country enjoys over another in proximity of raw materials and markets. Cotton can be brought to Lancashire from Virginia almost as cheaply as to Massachusetts, and the Manchester Ship Canal is calculated to cut a fourth off the whole freight to Bombay, Coal is no lono-er the monopoly of any particular nation, and may be superseded any day for motor purposes by electricity. Improved machinery is no sooner made in one country than it is imported or imitated in another ; and as the material elements of the competition are growing equal, the supremacy must obviously go to the nation that can turn these elements to most account — the nation with the most vigorous, the most intelligent, the most productive working class. As Macaulay said in his famous speech on the Ten Hours Bill, if we are ever to be deprived of our industrial supremacy it will only be by a finer and more powerful industrial people than tlie people of England, and a finer and more powerful industrial people than the people of England is not built up in a day. It is a great mistake, as I have already had an opportunity of showing, to imagine that the introduction of machinery has in any degree diminished the importance of the influence which differences in the personal efficiency of the L 146 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. labour of rival nations are capable of exerting on the results of the production of these nations and on their fortunes in mutual competition. Personal effi- ciency plays as decisive and controlling a part under machinery as it does in hand labour ; and as in other respects it is playing a greater part in the contest, then if we have been able to keep ahead of other nations in the past by keeping ahead of them in personal effi- ciency, we need not fear losing our ground now through anything that cultivates that quality to greater per- fection. As much of the existing error on the subject of short hours arises from under-rating the importance of this personal factor in the international competition, we may give some words to that point before proceeding further. In the national distribution of industrial gifts it has been observed by Professor Roscher that the French stand first for taste in work, the Germans for intelli- gence in work, and the English for energy in work. Foreign employers have found many faults with the English labourer. He was — at least in old times — the worst educated of all labourers, he was the most dissi- pated, he was the most unruly ; but for sheer power of work, for combined force and endurance, for close, continuous, effective, and rapid application, it is universally admitted that he has never had a rival, except among his own kinsfolk in America and Australia. Michel Chevalier, the eminent French economist, who was an engineer before he was an IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 147 economist, and had practical knowledge of workpeople, says that the Englishman is physically better fitted for labour than the Frenchman, having firmer sinews and more vigorous muscle, and that he carries on his work with more perseverance and method. " He becomes interested in it and passionately bent upon it. If he meets with an obstacle in his task he attacks it with devouring passion which a Frenchman can feel only in the presence of an adversary in the human form."^ Precisely the same thing was told to the Factory Commission of 1833 by Edwin Rose, who had been manager of a mill in Alsace. He said he thought the French had not that perseverance which the English have. He had often noticed them trying a thing, and then if it did not answer at first they seemed terrified and shrugged up their shoulders and threw it aside, whereas an English workman would keep trying and trying and would not give up nearly so soon as the Frenchman. This perseverance in a diffi- culty, this determination not to be beaten by it, this passion to master it, of wliich Chevalier speaks, is the result of physical and mental energy, but it had the effect of quickening the workman's intelligence in his work, so as almost to make up for what used to be his chief defect, his want of general education. Mr. Mundella, who is well acquainted with the labourers of many countries, thinks the English excel even in natural intelligence, and Mr. Hans Wunderley, a Swiss ' Chevalier, The UniLcd States, p. 280. L 2 148 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap cotton-spinner, who employs English, French, German Italian, and Swiss, told the Commission on Technical Instruction that " in practical knowledge of their work, in mechanical genius they are better without technical knowledge than the Continental workmen are with it, while in physical endurance and all-round capacity they have no rivals." ^ Mr Brassey, the eminent railway contractor, who enjoyed unexampled opportunities of comparing the workmen of different countries, came to a similar conclusion. He found English labour superior to Continental in branches of industry like mining and tunnelling, because of its greater energy, endurance, and courage ; and he found it superior also in branches like engineering, because it was more practically go- ahead and resourceful.^ When constructing the Paris and Rouen railway, on which he employed 4,000 Englishmen and 6,000 Frenchmen, he took special pains to ascertain the relative industrial capacity of the two nationalities, and found that, though the Englishmen wrought two hours and a half less in the day, three of them did as much in the week as four Frenchmen in ordinary navvy work, and as much as six Frenchmen in the heavier work, and they could after all be still relied on, which the Frenchmen could not, for making an additional spurt under pressure.^ And whatever be the case with the French navvy, the English navvy ^ Second Report of Commission on Technical Instruction, p. 269. ^ Helps' Life of Mr. Brassey, p. 81. 3 Brassey, fVork and Wages, p. 81. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 149 seems to liave improved in liis power of work since that time, for when the Bedford line was made about 1862 it was foimd that, though the weekly wages were rather higher than when the Great Northern line was made, the work never cost more than elevenpence a yard^ while it would have cost eighteenpence on the Great Northern.^ Fifteen years of free trade had perhaps told on their condition. Mr, Bright once said that free trade had added thousands of tons to the weight of the British working class. In other trades the testimony is similar. Sir I. Lowthian Bell states that though Luxemburg ironstone is not harder to work than Cleveland ironstone two Cleveland miners will take out ten and a half tons of stone in an eight-hours day, while two Luxemburg miners will only take out ten tons in a twelve-hours one.^ Edwin Rose said two Enoflish masons would in his time do the work of three French ones, and Mr. Brassey found at Alderney break- water in 1852 that on piece-work English masons earned a fourth more and sometimes even a half more than French masons.^ It has often been stated how Sir W. Armstrong imported French, German, Belgian, and Norwegian engineers during the strike of 1871, and found them much dearer in the end than English workmen ; and it was stated by the Secretary of the Amalsramated Eniiinecrs to the Trades Union Com- ^ Brassey, Work and Wages, p. 226. 2 Bell, Iron Trade of the United Kingdom, \>. 8i>. 3 Brassey, Work and Wages, p. 85. 150 EIGHT HOUltS FOR WORK chap. mission, that English machine makers working in France made 56s. a week for the same quantity of work they would only get 36s. for in England, Coming now to the textile trades, which are peculiarly subject to foreign competition, and in which the personal differences between the workers of different nations are often supposed to be neutralised by the spread of self-acting machinery, we find precisely analogous results. The same machinery will, in English hands, turn out a much larger product per machine as well as per man than it will in Continental hands. From a very careful investigation made into this subject recently by Dr. Schulze-Gavernitz, it appears that there are only 2*4 operatives for 1,000 spindles in Oldham, while there are 5 '8 in Mulhouse, 8"9 in Alsace generally, 6*2 in Switzerland, Baden, and Wurtemberg, 7*2 in Saxony, and 25 in Bombay.^ That circumstance alone shows the personal superiority of English labour telling on the production to the extent of 140 per cent, above the best Continental labour. But besides that, the spindles run at greater speed in England, and the stoppages are much fewer and shorter. At Mulhouse, which comes nearest us of all Continental manufacturing centres, the spindles run 10 per cent, slower than they do in English mills, and yet it appears from a statement made by an Alsace manufacturer at the German Commission of Inquiry, that in consequence of stoppages to knot broken * Schulze-Giivemitz, Ber Gross-betrieh, p. 121. IV FOEEIGN COMPETITION 151 threads or put machinery right or for other reasons, the spindles are not actually running more than 80 per cent, of the time the labourers are there, while English spindles run from 02 to 95 per cent.^ There is here a gain of 10 per cent, in the speed of the machinery and 15 per cent, in time saved — in all 25 per cent, in the use of each machine, and as the English operative attends to two and a half times more machinery than the Alsatian, the gain from these sources must be set down at 60 per cent., which, added to the previous 140 per cent, makes a total gain of 200 per cent, arising under machine work from the greater personal efficiency of the English labourer. It would not pay to run the machinery faster in Alsace or to give the workpeople charge of more spindles a-piece because the time lost in stoppages and the waste of raw material would be too much increased. In weaving the state of the comparison is the same as in spinning. The Alsace weaver attends on an average 1'5 looms running 140 picks a minute while our Lancashire weaver attends on an average 3'9 looms running 240 picks a minute ; ^ and yet, though attending to so many more looms running so much faster, the English weaver loses much less time in accidental or necessary stoppages than the Alsatian. He loses only 16*6 of his time through threads breaking and other interruptions, while the Alsatian loses 20 or 1 Schulze-Gavernitz, p. 118. ^ jj;-^_ pp_ 193^ 194^ 152 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. 30 per cent, of his, and if the Alsatian loom is sped to 160 picks, the loss mounts, according to M. Karl Grad, a considerable authority on the Alsace cotton industry, to 34 per cent. Raise the speed to the English rate of 240 picks, and it is obvious that half the time of looms and men would bo lost in Alsace, all, as M. Grad frankly admits, for want of labour of the same personal efficiency. The English weaver attends to 160 per cent, more looms, running 70 per cent, faster, and loses 10 per cent, less of his working time. The Alsatian loses three hours of his twelve-hours day, while the Englishman loses only an hour and a half of his nine- hours one, so that in effective work the machinery is occupied about as long in the short-hours country as in the long-hours one. Nor is this yet all. For though the Englishman attends to more than twice the number of machines running twice as fast, he requires less supervision. There is one overlooker in England for every 60,000 or 80,000 spindles, one overlooker in Alsace for every 15,000, and one overlooker in Saxony for every 3,000 or 4,000.^ English overlookers are quite as superior as English workmen. Mr. Redgrave, the late Chief Inspector of Factories, mentions in his Report for 1866, that he was told by the manager of a cotton- factory at Oldenburgh, that if the machinery was superintended by English overlookers, it would with local labour turn out the same amount in 14^ hours ^ Schulze-Gavernitz, p. 142. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 153 as the same machinery with English labour would turn out in 10, but if it were superintended by German overlookers, it would not turn out nearly so much. The extra overlookers, moreover, are not the only extras. It is still true, as it was sixty years ago, in Edwin Rose's time, that you have not only twice the number of hands, but "you must have twice as large a building to contain the hands, twice as many clerks and bookkeepers, and overlookers to look after them, and twice as many tools to do the same quantity of work as is done here in England." It is to this extra army of auxiliaries, as we have seen, that Messrs. Holden attribute the fact that though they have a carding mill in France with the same machinery as their mill in England, they cannot card so cheaply in France in spite of the low wages. After all this, is it any wonder to read in Dr. Gaver- nitz's book, how the German manufacturers giving evidence at the Commission of Inquiry, one after another said they were confounded to find that the country where labour was really cheapest was the country where the wages were highest and the hours shortest, or to read in the letter of a German ironmaster to Sir I. L. Bell, explaining why he employed twice as many men for the same work as would be done in an English blast-furnace — " We have often the same tech- nical appliances as you in England, for anything an engineer sees he can imitate and construct, but what we cannot imitate is to work with our cheaply-fed men 154 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. with the same vigour that your Enghsh workmen labour." ^ We beat them simply by more energetic labour, and the same thing is shown perhaps even in some ways more strikingly at home. Why is the cotton industry of Glasgow going down before the competition of Lanca- shire ? Coal and iron are as near Glasgow as Lancashire, the climate is quite as damp, the machinery is or may be as good, the hours of work are the same, the em- ployers are quite as keen in management, the wages are considerably lower, yet though in certain fancy goods the Scotch manufacturers still hold their own, they are simply nowhere whenever it comes to plain goods in which quantity tells. The whole reason is the superiority of Lancashire labour. Mr. James Henderson, who had much experience of both localities as factory inspector, soys : " There are no operatives of whom I have ever had any experience, who work with so much energy as the Lancashire people, and the contrast between a Scotch and a Lancashire weaving factory in this respect is very remarkable. The Lancashire weaver works with a will; she earns a high wage (on an average double that of her Scotch sister in the same class of work), and is anxious to maintain it. She will take charge of four power- looms without hesitation In Scotland, on the other hand, it is common to find weavers of long experi- ^ Bell's Iron Trade of the United Kingdom, p. 564. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 155 euce with only two looms, and it is with difficulty that they can be persuaded to take a third." ^ In 1890 the Glasgow Trades Council sent a special commissioner to inquire into the relative circumstances of Scotcli and Lancashire cotton-weavers, and found among other things, that though the Scotch weavers got only half the weekly wages of the Lancashire weavers, the cost of weaving to the manufacturer was higher in Scotland, because the weavers were so much less efficient. Scotland is losing her cotton industry through nothing but the comparative inefficiency of her labour, and if that were further investigated, it would be found that the low wages had much to do with it. The hicfh wases of Lancashire draw the best labourers of the district into that particular trade, and secure to them the sound nourishment on which industrial energy depends. The wages of cotton operatives in Scotland are too low to tempt the best labour into that trade, or to sustain the energies of those who come for heavy work. The ascendency of Lancashire over Scotland, and the ascendency of England over Alsace, have thus been determined by superior personal energy and that alone ; yet employers, if we may judge by their testimony to the Labour Commission, go day after day to their mills, and watch the process of production, and cannot see any possibility of better personal exertion telling on the result at all. But their opposition to the proposal of 1 Factor]! Report, October, 1890, p. 7. 156 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. an eiglit-liours day arises very largely from their im- perfect realisation of that fact. " It is not possible," said one, " to match a machine, running 9 hours a day, against a foreign counterpart running 10 or 12." The whole thing, said another, " goes by clockwork, and if there is a quarter of an hour of a stoppage, there is a quarter of an hour's loss at the end of the week ; it never can be made up." But with the inetlicient labour of loug-hour countries, there are always more of such stoppages, and the stoppages last longer. Belgian manufacturers told Mr. Kennedy, of the British Em- bassy, that in Belgian mills they were constantly losing half an hour trying to discover the cause of some interruption of the work which English opera- tives, from their better understanding of machinery were able to explain at once to the overlookers. Then mucli of the time machinery is nominally running is occupied in putting work on the machine and taking it off. Mr. Wigram, of the eminent engineering firm of Messrs. Fowler, in Leeds, calculates that in engineer- ing one-fourth or one-fifth of the whole working day is spent so. We have seen that Alsatian operatives take twice or thrice as long over this sort of work as English operatives ; so that they would lose a third of the day of the machinery in that way, where English operatives would only lose a sixth. Now if you cut a third off an eleven-hours day you have only seven and a third hours left of effective work of the machinery ; whereas if you take a sixth off a nine hours day you IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 157 have seven and a half hours left : and even with an eight-hours day you have nearly seven hours left — that is to say, the machine is really at work longer in the short day of England than in the long day of the Con- tinent; and that is due to the fact that Englisli labourers are men of greater physical and mental energy than Continental labourers ; and that again is in an essential part due to the shorter hours they habitually work. If we throw into the account the greater speed at which efficient labour permits the machinery to run, and the greater quantity of machinery it permits to be entrusted to individual hands, it becomes very plain that an hour's more running of the machinery, which employers so often represent as a matter of life or death to them, is really of very trivial importance to the product of the machinery as com^^ared with even very ordinary differences in personal vigour and efficiency. Even according to their own utmost expectations an hour more or less in the day would only make a difference of lU or 11 per cent, on the product; whereas a change from the more efficient labour of England to the less efficient labour of the Continent mioht, as we have seen, make on the same machinery a difference of 200 per cent. Machinery, so far from curtailing the importance of the personal differences^ seems rather to increase it; for we have seen that in navvy labour three Englishmen did the work of four Frenchmen in the lighter jobs, and six in the heavy ; 158 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. but here in machine work they do 200 per cent, more— i.e., three do the work of nine. So much for the competitive vakie of personal energy in work. The only things in which our workpeople seem to be inferior to those of the Continent are those kinds of work for which energy is, in a sense, a disquali- fication. Energetic natures dislike slow, tedious, minute processes. No manner of protective duty has ever been able to induce the Americans to grow and dress their own flax, and Sir C. W. Siemens thinks that though English workmen beat the world for the amount they produce from a machine, they are behind several of the Continental nations for work needing great personal care and patient application, such as watch-making and the production of philosophical or telegraphic instru- ments. Still, we must take energy with its natural defects, and there can, at any rate, be no question that it is the most valuable of all industrial qualities for large production in the great staple trades. To proceed now a step further, this national charac- teristic of high productive energy, which has given us the superiority over Continental countries in the indus- trial competition, is itself the product of those high wages and short hours which are so commonly supposed to handicap us heavily for the race. Other causes have co-operated, no doubt ; climate in particular has had a considerable influence, but in the main industrial energy is the fruit of due nourishment and due repose. We are not specially concerned with wages here, but a word IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 159 or two about them may assist the argument. It used to be an old employer's prejudice that more work was got from their workpeople on low wages than on high. Arthur Young found the opinion universal among the Manchester manufacturers in last century that their men did less work in good years Avhen provisions were cheap because they idled away more of their time ; and it seems to be thought by some economists (Giivernitz and Brentano, for example) that tliis opinion was prob- ably true of the old hand-labour in the age before factories, because men then wrought habitually by fits and starts. But it was not true then, for at the very moment when the Manchester manufacturers were un- animously laying down that opinion to Arthur Young, Adam Smith was refuting it by positive statistics, and showing that, spite of the time idled away by many, a greater quantity of work was turned out by the whole body. But now we are realising that, generally speak- ino- men's work is in almost direct ratio to their diet or, in other words, to their wages. Mr. Brassey found that agricultural labourers, when they began to work on a railway, would lie down exhausted at three in the afternoon, but after twelve months of higher wages and better food, they would get into better working condi- tion and be able to perform their task without difficulty; and when Mr. D. Pidgeon visited the Willimantic Thread Mills in Connecticut, he found the firm supply- ing their younger hands gratuitously with a cup of milk and a slice of bread and butter between meals, and 160 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. owning themselves more than recouped by the increase of production which even so small a service of food enabled to be made. The best fed nations — the English and American — are the largest producers, but give other nationalities the same fare and they soon show near the same work. It is many years since Messrs. Manby and Wilson got the French hands in their Charenton foundry to eat as much meat as their English hands, and found, as tbey had hoped, that as soon as the better diet had time to tell, they did nearly as much work as the English too.^ Irishmen have long been notoriously poor workmen in their own country, Mr. Fox, a manufacturer in Cork and Manchester, informed the Trades Union Commis- sion that though he paid 20 per cent, lower wages in his Cork factory than in his Manchester one, the work done cost him exactly the same in both. But the Irishman in England and America, workino^ under the higher wages prevailing there, becomes as good a work- man as any in the country. Sir I. Lowthiau Bell mentions that many young Irishmen come over to the Cleveland Iron Works, and though they are not worth much at first, that " as soon as their improved style of living permits it," they become equal to any workmen in Cleveland, both for ability and will to work. It takes time for the physical process of transmutation even in the case of individuals, but for a nation this is a long economic difficulty to surmount. A whole ^ Chevalier, Cours dc V Econuiaie politique, i. 11(3. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 161 nation cannot raise its wages at once, because the wages it can afford to pay to-day are fixed and limited by the productive capacity of to-day. Wages and productive capacity push each other on, and the peoj^lo that has the start in time is not easily caugbt if it manages wisely. Now the case with regard to short hours is very much the same as with rei^ard to wao;es. Tliere are still some here and there who seem to believe in the old maxim of Richelieu, that working men are to be compared with mules, who are less spoiled by work than by repose ; but on the whole the beneficial effect of reasonable repose is now generally admitted, and nobody would think it wise or profitable to return to the very long hours of the early part of the century. And here again, what is good for one nation has proved good for others ; all have alike benefited in productive capacity by abandoning long hours of labour. When Mr, Scott, the eminent Greenock ship-builder, opened a yard in France, he reduced the hours of the French shipwrights from twelve to ten, and says he found it advantageous so far as he was concerned. Indeed, he raised their wages in consequence from four francs a day to four and a half, so that they must have done more work in the shorter day than the longer one.^ When the hours were reduced to eleven in 1872 in Canton Glarus the manufacturers prophesied ruin, but obtained 99"15 per cent, of their old production in the ^ Trade Depression Commission, Qu. 11934-6. M 162 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. first year, and more than their old production in the next. The eleven-hours day was introduced into the rest of Switzerland in 1878, and Dr. Schuler, the factory inspector, extracts the following results from the books of a spinning mill whose machinery was too old to be speeded except very slightly. In 1876-7 in twelve hours the mill produced 872-18 ko. of yarn per 10,000 spindles; but in 1879-80 it produced 388-88.1 In 1881 the Swiss factory inspector reports a tannery and a watch factory as having voluntarily reduced their hours to ten, and having in both cases found the same quantity produced in the day, and an improvement in quality.^ The textile manufacturers of a particular district of Bohemia reduced their hours in 1870, and while they got at first a little less product in the day they soon got more than before.^ M. Freese, window- blind manufacturer, at Hamburg and Berlin, who had reduced his hours to nine in 1890, and found the step answer, reduced them further to eight in 1892, and obtained from a majority of his hands an increase of the quantity produced without any loss of quality,* M. Heye, a glass manufacturer, near Dusseldorf, had already some years ago substituted the eight hours day for the ten and eleven-hours day without suffering any diminution in the output of his men. Experiences like these show that it is possible for ^ ArehivfUr Sozial Geselzgehung, bd. iv. p. 90. ^ JUd^ 3 Frankel, Die Tagliche Arbeitzeit, p. 32. * Economic Journal, iii. 373 IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 163 Continental manufacturers to improve their competing capacity, as ours have done, by reducing their hours of labour beneath the limits generally prevailing at present, and it is very plain from the elaborate evidence laid before the Trade Depression Commission that their present long hours have never been any advantage to them or any disadvantage to us. Many instances of their successful competition against us in neutral markets, and even in our own home markets, were ex- amined by that Commission, but in no single instance was the success of the foreign producers due even in part to their long hours. It was always due to their producing a better or more suitable article, because the English manufacturers did not possess the skill or the knowledge or the taste to produce anything so good, or because they did not take the same pains to study the wants of customers. The French beat us in silks because they knew better how to produce good dyes. Chemnitz ran us hard in hosiery, because Chemnitz managers were better designers in consequence of their better education general and technical. Belgium was for the same reason taking some of the wool trade from Scotland and Dewsbury. Bradford had lost its trade by sticking to a particular kind of stuff which the public no longer wanted, and recovered its trade again when it supplied the thing there was a market for. Its machinery was suited to the former and not to the latter, but when the proper machinery was got the hours made no difference. Belgium was cutting us out M 2 164 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. in small arms in some markets abroad because it made a fanciful class of gun that was liked there, and had at one time sent small arms into Birmingham itself, because Birmingham could not at the moment make enough to supply its own orders. Much ado was made about importations of iron girders from Belgium, but the reason was that it was a kind of girder which was in great demand in Belgium and little demand here, and for which it was thought profitable to erect special mills for their manufacture in Belgium but not profit- able to do so in England. And so the complaint and answer went round. In no case had the hours wrought anything to do with the Continental superiority. Even the linen manufacturers of Belfast, who asked for a lengthening of the day from 56| to 60 hours to stop the decline of their trade, admitted that their trade was declining quite as much under 60 hours as it had since done under 56|, so that the shortening of the day placed them in no worse position than they were in before. The only long-houred nation that can pretend to compete with us in industrial energy is America, but it is more than doubtful whether its long hours give it any advantage. Americans used to claim that two of their operatives would do as much work in a week as three of ours, and they still claim, as Mr. Harris-Gastrell tells us in his most interesting Report Lo the Foreign Office on the subject, that American labour is 20 per cent, more efficient than English — that is, that four IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 165 Americans will equal five Euglishmen. In tlie claim, as thus reduced, Mr. Gastrell seems disposed to ac- quiesce, but it is very doubtful nevertheless. In the first place, Euglishmen working m America, side by side with Americans, receiving the same high rate of wages, and able therefore to live as well, seem, in some occupations at any rate, to prove themselves more efficient workmen than their transatlantic cousins. In sheer strength they are admitted to have no rivals. Mr. Abram Hewitt, of New York, the well-known ironmaster and politician, stated to the Trade Union Commission that in American ironworks they found Englishmen the best workmen ; that Americans were more active and better in some of the lighter work, such as girder rolling, but when it came to puddling the heavy bars the English were better. " When we want physical force combined with skill we get Englishmen," ^ and the reason, he said, was that the English are a physically better-developed race than the Americans. This view is confirmed by some statistics recently collected by the United States Commissioner of Labour of the income and expenditure of working men of differ- ent nationalities in the iron-ore, pig-iron, bar-iron, steel coal-mining, and coke industries. By nationality the return means the native country of the father of the family; in seven leading nationalities a sufficient number of families have been examined to affi^rd a sort of solid basis of comparison, and the personal earnings ^ Ecport of Trade Union Commission, Qii. 6979, 6980. 166 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. of the head of the family in each case may be taken as good enough index of the amount of his output for purposes of testing their comparative efficiency. The result shows the native-horn American to stand low in the scale, and the English to be in a position of un- expected inferiority to Welsh, Scotch, and even Irish. Number of Workprs. Nationality. Average Income. Ill Welsh 614 dollars. 62 Scotch 572 „ 276 German 569 ,, 385 Irish 551 „ 238 English 534 „ 1294 American 520 „ 24 ..... , French 463 „ Immigrant labour is thus decidedly superior to native bom. It is more difficult to compare American labour — native and immigrant together — with English labour working at home ; but Sir I. Lowthian Bell has made some careful investigations into the subject, and calculates, after a comparison of five American furnaces with ten furnaces of Cleveland, that the workers in an English furnace, with a shorter working day, move 2,400 tons of fuel ore and limestone in the week while the same number of Americans move only 2,100 tons.^ He says also that, from the excessive heat in summer and from an unwillingness to exert themselves as our men do, it is not an unusual thing in America to have fully twice as many men to do the same kind of work in keeping and tending the slag as we have in the North ^ Iron Trade of the United Kingdom, p. 137. rv FOREIGN COMPETITION 167 of England (p. 568), and that on an average there are in an American furnace one-sixth more hands to do one-half less work. In the textile trades, Professor Peshine Smith informs us that American manufacturers used to count that they had an advantage of 20 per cent, in the contest with English competition in the education of their workpeople alone ; but that was in the days when American mills were worked by cul- tivated women, like the Lowell girls celebrated by Dickens and Miss Martineau, and when more than half the workpeople in English factories were unable to read.^ But the Lowell girl has long left the American factories to the Irish and the French Canadian ; and English workmen, except the remnant belonging to the age before the Education Act, are now better educated on the whole than American. The question has been recently reinvestigated by Mr. Schoenhof by personal inquiry in Lancashire, and at Lowell, Massachusetts, and he comes to the general conclusion that the labour cost of spinning is 14 per cent, higher in Massachusetts and the labour cost of weaving 28 per cent, higher in Lancashire."^ Dr. Schulze-Gavernitz compares Lan- cashire not with Lowell only, but with all New England, and makes the labour cost of spinning 40 per ^ Mr. Mundella told the Committee on Scientific Instruction in 1868 that an educational census had been priviitely made of the factories and workshops of Nottingham, and showed that "the ability to read a very simple paragraph is not possessed by 50 per cent, of the people em- ployed in our large establishments" {Report, Qu. 4601-3). ^ The Economy of High Wages, p. 240. 168 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. cent, higher in New England, and the labour cost of weaving to be 26 per cent, higher in Lancashire. Yet the wages of the spinners are higher in Lancashire and the wages of weavers are higher in New England.^ In both cases manufacturers get their work done cheapest in the country where they pay the highest wages. Now in spinning, the result is plainly enough due to the superior personal efficiency of English spinners, for though our climate gives us a certain advantage over American competitors by facilitating the process of spinning and lessening the waste of raw material, the whole of this advantage is estimated by Mr. E. Atkinson, the American economist, as making a differ- ence of only 7 per cent, to the cost ; and here we have a difference of 14 percent, at Lowell and 40 percent, in New England generally. But in the matter of weaving there are certain circumstances which interfere with the exacti- tude of the comparison. An American weaver attends to six or eight looms (in Lowell the average is six and three-quarters), while the English average is not more than four ; but the English looms go a little faster ; they produce, as Mr. Schoenhof admits, a sightlier, better- finished, and more marketable article, and they produce a much greater variety of fabrics. In this last respect, Mr. Schoenhof, accustomed to American methods, was amazed when he -visited a large mill at Salford, to see 3,100 looms at work and not twenty of them employed on the same kmd of article. In America one mill confines ^ Schulze-Gavemitz, p. 156. IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 169 its attention to one class of article, and the workpeople are naturally able to turn out a greater quantity in consequence of this greater specialisation. Besides, the variety in English production tends to vitiate com- parison by looms, for looms are of different width for different fabrics, and one class of goods needs more personal care than another. Nor must it be forgotten that the American works as a rule in a much roomier, airier, and better ventilated mill than the English, and that is an advantage — happy attainable — which tells most appreciably on the amount of the worker's pro- duction. I take no account of the fact that the English weaver works only 56| hours in the week, while the Massachusetts weaver works 60, because that has been proved to be no disadvantage to the English weavers, for, as Mr. Birtwistle explicitly informed the Labour Commission, they produce now in the 56| hours four per cent, more than they produced before in the 60, and all in consequence of their increased personal exertion.^ It may be noted too that although the hours at Lowell are only 10 a day, while in the most of New England they are still 11, Lowell is a much more formidable rival of this country than the New England States generally. It goes far nearer us in the spinning, and beats us by more points in the weaving. The longer the day the weaker the competition. On the whole the evidence available to us does not a]3pear to support the old opinion once so generally en- ^ Report of Labour Commission, Qu. 1539. 170 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. tertained of the distinct superiority of American over English labour in productive capacity, and as the Americans are generally admitted to enjoy a better diet, it must be the fault of their longer hours that they do not show a better result. It seems likely, from the remarkable way in which all Euglisli observers speak of the pace Australians work at, the " go " they put into their work, the quantity they get through in the time employed, and their brisk cheerful and robust appearance, that if we are to meet our betters any- where in mere energy in work, we must go for them now to the short-houred labour of Australia instead of the long-houred labour of the United States. The late Admiral Sir George Tryon said that though Australian workmen got high wages they always gave good work for it and never dawdled, and Captain Henderson, R.N., said they coaled a shij) three times as fast as English labourers. And whereas the American-born workman, as we have seen, appears to be inferior to the English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish immigrants in America, the best workman in Australia is said to be the Australian born. In the cotton industry the great fear at present seems to come from the competition of India ; and the competition of India of course must not be despised. For the Indian manufacturer has many advantages. He has his raw materials and his market at his very door, and he has abundance of cheap and by no means hand- less labour, but wages have recently been rising very IV FOEEIGN COMPETITION 171 much upou him, the climate will always be against him except for spiuuing the coarser numbers, his coal is very dear, his plant costs him 50 per cent, more than it would in England and wears out sooner, and when he has won any advantage hitherto it has not come from cheaper production than ours, but, exactly as in the Continental successes already mentioned, by pro- duction more suitable for the markets in which the successes have been won. Several of the witnesses examined at the Manchester Chamber of Commerce Inquiry into this subject explained that the reason why Chinese buyers prefer Bombay goods to English is that the Bombay spinners in order to please the Chinese, spin a special soft yarn which makes a more velvety feeling cloth and takes in, besides, the cheap Chinese dyes better than the hand-spun yarn of England, whereas the English spinners are quite unacquainted with the wants of the Chinese and do not produce what they like. Long hours and short hours have nothing to do with the result. If the hours of England were long and the hours of Bombay were short, the Chinese would still buy their goods all the same from the people that suited their taste, and give the go-by to the goods of the people that gave no thought to the requirements of the market they were making for. In fact in any case, nothing is more obvious than that the long hours of India, of which so much ado is made in Manchester, cannot be considered in any sense among the native manufacturer's advantao^es. In 172 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. Calcutta the hours of cotton operatives are really shorter than in Lancashire. The mills run 12 hours, but the operatives work in three shifts and none are in the mill more than 9 hours a day.^ When we recollect the easy way in which Indian workpeople leave their work for a smoke or a drink or a talk when- ever they feel inclined, we have no difficulty in under- standing that in Calcutta the time of actual work is considerably less than at Manchester. But even in Bombay, though the operatives might be nominally on duty in the mill for the whole 12 hours, Mr. Moos, the chief factor}- inspector of the Presidency, says they are such persistent dawdlers that they never really did more than 6 hoars work out of the 12.^ Dr. Babadhurgi of Bombay, said at the Hygiene and Demography Con- gress in London in 1891, that to compare an Indian with an English factory worker was like comparing a buggy hack with a race-horse. The Hindoo liked to take his time to everything. He had half an hour's grace both in coming to the mill and going. When he came he could take his shave and his shampoo in the mill, he could go out and in whenever he liked without any restriction except that not more than a fourth of the whole hands must be out at any one time, and 15 or 20 per cent, of his stated hours at the mill was every day spent in lounging in the compound. The women brought their children to the mill with them ^ Report of Commission on Indian FcLctorics, 1891, p. 33. - Labour Commission, Foreign Reports, vol. ii., p. 136. Iv FOREIGN COMPETITION 173 and attended to them there. Then besides these intermissions of work on the days they are present, 20 per cent, of the hands are. usually absent altogether — 10 per cent, without sending any substitute and 10 per cent, sending in some friend — not likely to be so efficient a worker — to take their place, A mill employ- ing 2,450 hands is mentioned in the Factory Commis- sioner's report, from which 250 persons, on an average, stopped away every day without sending any substitute, and 200 more stojjped away but sent substitutes.^ And the manager of the mill said it could be worked with 500 hands in England. This was at Nagpur, but the state of things is the same in Bombay. Mr. J. C. Fielden told the Manchester Chamber of Com- merce that while a mill in Oldham with 30,000 sj)indles, and spinning No. 20 would require 240 hands, it would require 750 in Bombay, and Mr. Greaves stated that a 40,000 spindle mill in Bombay would require 760 hands, of whom 10 per cent, would be away daily for a holiday. Then it must be remembered that in English mills the machinery runs much faster, so that while one of the best mills in Bombay, with good machinery, would only turn out 5*60 ounces per spindle in its long day of 12 hours, an Oldham mill will turn out 24 ounces per spindle in its shorter day of 9.2 In the face of facts like these it is the merest foolishness to tremble before the long hours of India, ^ P. 54. 2 MancJiester Chamber of Commerce Tnqtiiry, p. 88. 174 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. whatever other elements there may be in the com- petition of tliat country to give rise to anxiety. And after all, the question for . the cotton operative and cotton manufacturer of this country is not whether we are producing as much in our short hours now as other nations are producing in their long ones, but rather whether we shall be able to produce as much, if we shorten our hours to 8, as we are producing now in 9. If we cannot do so, then we sliall to that extent injure our powers of competition ; but if we can, our jjosition is unaltered and we can safely act for ourselves without caring a straw what other nations do in the matter. That point remains yet to be tested experi- mentally in the cotton industry, but there is at least nothing in our past experience of reductions of hours in that industry or our present experience of the eight- hours day in other industries, to make fear a more reasonable attitude to take than hope, and hope has at any rate this point in its favour, that it will try the experiment. So far then as things have yet gone the shortest- houred people are the best workers. As we have shortened our hours we have improved our competing capacity. And the question now comes to be whether we shall do the same again by the further shortening which is now proposed. It is manifest that this ex- perience cannot be repeated indefinitely, and that there must be a natural limit after which the time remaining for work will be too little for the improvement IV FOREIGN COMPETITION 175 to tell to the required extent on the result. And in reply to the question which many persons think an unanswerable reductio ad dbsurdum — Where are you to stop ? when you get 8 hours, will you then want 6 ? and when you get 6 will yieline de laine, " a mixed fabric of cotton and wool," he says, " which is used when figured for wt)men's dresses." A special run on this class of mixed fabrics seems to have come in during the spring of 1848, and it seems to have gone out again in the spring of 1851, for Mr. Saunders then reports the worsted trade to be in a more unsatisfactory state than any other, and the high profits of 1850 to be already away. It was comparatively recently that mixed fabrics had come into vogue at all, and the remarkable extent of that vogue may be seen from figures supplied from private sources by Mr. Edward Baines, in a paper read at the Leeds meeting of the British Association in 1858 : Quantities of Wousted Stuffs Expouted. Worsted Stutls Mixed Stuffs Year. (unmixed). (Worsted and Cotton or Silk). 1830 , , . . . 1,252,000 pieces . . , . 1,100,000 yards 1840 . . . . , 1,718,000 „ . . . . . 3,629,000 „ 1850 , . . . . 2,122,000 ,, . . . . 52,573,000 „ Both classes of stuffs progressed moderately before 1840 ; but in the next ten years, while the unmixed fabrics increased 23 per cent, the mixed fabrics increased by the amazing figure of 1,379 per cent. The use of V THE UNEMPLOYED 197 cotton warps brought into the market not only cheaper stuffs, but an immense variety of them, and as they got better known the demand for them came in bounds and bursts. It was evidently one of these bursts of which we see the sign in the enormous increase of 52 per cent, in the number of worsted factory hands in the brief period between 1847 and 1850, and it seems likely that the whole of this increase which is not accounted for by the reabsorption of the unemployed and the regular growth of the factory system, is due to that burst of extraordinary demand for this new class of goods. This seems likely, because Mr. Saunders in- forms us in April, 1850, that in the year 1849 alone the worsted looms increased their produce 40 per cent., and the spindles 25 or 30 per cent., and that they were still increasing at the same rate. Many mills ran night and day by means of relays, so that, whereas the number of hands per horse-power in worsted mills was only 5'7 in 1845 and 59 in 1856, it was 7-4 in 1850. The enormous increase of production is shown in the export returns. These returns, it is true, did not then dis- tinguish worsted goods from woollen as they do now, but I understand that worsteds would constitute then, as now, three-fourths of the entire export. Well, the quantity exported in 1847 was exceeded by 56 per cent, in 1848, by 60 per cent, in 1840, and by 97 per cent, in 1850; and as the whole deficiency of 1847 (judging from declared values) Avas only 17 per cent., the production of 1850 was 80 per cent, greater than 198 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. the normal jDrodiiction before 1847; and that must have required '40 per cent, more hands, or 20,870. The whole increase of operatives was 27,559, and after deducting 5,700 for the reabsorption of unemployed, and 20,870 for the natural growth of the factory system, together with the unusual increase of demand for worsted goods, there are only 989 left, that may possibly have owed their employment to the Ten Hours Act. The flax and silk trades need not detain us so long. In November, 1846, according to Mr. Saunders's reports, the flax trade was suffering above others. Out of forty- six flax mills in one of his sub- districts seven were wholly stopped, and about a third of the flax spinning machinery was lying idle in the works that remained open. Times got worse in the spring, when the general commercial depression set in, and in October, as Mr. Stuart states, seven flax mills out of twenty-three were closed in Belfast, and ten out of fifty-six were closed in Dundee. It is therefore probable that 10 per cent, of the flax mill operatives were out of employment in March, 1847 — i.e. about 6,000 persons. The flax trade, on the other hand, was one of the briskest in July, 1850 ; Mr. Saunders says it had partaken largely of the increased demand for goods; and we find from the statistics of the quantity of linen manufactures exported, which only began first to be collected for the year 1848, that the linen exports of 1850 exceeded those of 1848 by more than a fourth. Indeed, if we carry back the com- parison by the less exact means of the declared values V THE UNEMPLOYED 199 of the estimates for want of any better means, the linen exports of 1850 were a sixth larger than they had ever before been, so that not only must all the unemployed of 1847 have been now reabsorbed, but there was an additional growth of trade and productive means, which implied an increase of hands beyond the full working staff of that date. We know from the factory inspec- tors' reports that the same process of factory buildino- was continually going on in the flax trade as was going on at the same time in the other textile industries. In Mr. Saunders's district the horse-power in flax mills increased jO per cent, in the five years 1845 — 1850, and the hands increased 11 per cent. It cannot be too hiorh an estimate to set aside 4 per cent, for the natural increase of the flax trade and the factory system in the three years 1847 — 1850 Now, as the total increase of flax operatives in that period was 14 per cent., and it has been necessary to deduct 10 per cent, for re-absorp- tion of unemployed, and 4 per cent, for natural develop- ment, nothing remains for the Ten Hours Act. The returns for the silk manufacture are imperfect so far as the number of children employed in 1850 is concerned, and as the trade is not important and the others have taken up so much space, I need not enter upon it at all. In fact, the figures for the cotton trade alone are quite sufficient to prove that the Ten Hours Act made no sensible impression on the unemployed, and the reason is given by Mr. Horner in October, 1851 : — " In all those departments of the factory in which 200 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. men are paid by piecework (and these constitute probably not less than four-fifths of the whole, the proportion to fixed weekly wages being daily on the increase) it has been found that the quantity produced in ten and a half hours falls little short of that formerly obtained for twelve hours. In other instances it is said to be equal. This is accounted for partly by the in- creased stimulus given to ingenuity to make the ma- chinery more perfect and capable of increased speed; but it arises far more from the workpeople, by improved health, by absence of that weariness and exhaustion which the long hours occasioned, and by their increased cheerfulness and activity, being enabled to work more steadily and diligently, and to economise time, intervals of rest while at their work being now less necessary," This experience is the more remarkable because it occuiTsd in trades in which automatic machinery is universally employed, and the pace of the living agent is largely determined by the speed of the mechanical agent. If there is so much room for improvement in the personal energy of workpeople to tell in industries like these, it can be no source of surprise to find the same results in the common run of industrial occu- pations. Professor Munro has drawn attention to the circumstance that when the hours of engineers in this country were reduced from ten to nine a day in 1872, it made hardly any perceptible impression on the num- bers of unemployed members of the Society of Amal- gamated Engineers, there being 510 unemployed in V THE UNEMPLOYED 201 1871, 897 unemployed in 1872, and 465 in 1873. Professor Munro thinks this result probably due to the introduction of improved machinery, but the truth seems rather to be that no real reduction in the hours of labour occurred at all, and that the only change which actually took place was the payment of one hour more at overtime rates and of one hour less at ordinary rates. Mr. Redgrave, the factory inspector, states in 1872 that all the nine-hour trades wrought systematic overtime, and mentions the case of an engineering firm that had recently adopted the nine hours' system, but whose men, though nominally working fifty-four hours a week, were actually working eighty-four, and being paid for 106. Much better tests of the effect of shortening hours on the unemployed in the engineering trade are afforded by the experience of the various engineering firms who have recently replaced the nine by the eight hours' system. The surprising thing about these experiments is that the same staff of men have done more work in the forty-eight hours a week than they did before in the fifty-four hours, together with the overtime then habitual, and consequently neither Messrs. Johnson nor Messrs. Allan nor Messrs. Short required a single extra hand. The ironfounders had their hours shortened to nine in 1873, but while only 1"4< per cent, of the members of the Ironfounders' Union were out of work in 1872, 3"2 per cent, were out of work in 1873, 3*9 in 1874, and the proportion went on rising with the trade depression which shorter hours have no power to 202 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chaP check, till it was 223 per cent, in 1879. The Scotch ironmoulders had their hours reduced from sixty to fifty-one in 1872. But while their expenditure on unemployed benefits was only 5s. Id. per head in 1871, it rose to 10s, 4<^d. in 1872, and 14s. Id. per head in 1873, and so on till it was £3 8s. ll^d. per head in 1879. The Northumberland miners' hours were re- duced to eight in 1871, and again to seven in 1873, and their unemployed benefit expenditure, which was no- thing in 1870, was 2|rf. per head in 1871, again nothing in 1872, Is. 6^d. in 1873, Ud. in 1874, Is.S^d in 1875, Qs. 3ff?. in 1876, so that the reduction of hours was followed in both cases by a fall in the numbers of un- employed ^ in the first year after, and a rise again in the next. In the great majority of cases where the eight hours day has been practically tried, the same work has been done without calling in a single new hand. I have mentioned the seventy-four successful strikes for shorter hours in the building iron and tobacco trades of New York in 1885, which were estimated beforehand by the employers to necessitate the employment of 1,003 neAV hands, but did not in the event necessitate the engagement of a single new hand, because the old staff did the same work in the shorter time. Herr Freese required no extra help whatever in any depart- ment of his window blind factory, though he had more work done than before ; Messrs. Caslon required none in Report on Trade Union.';, 1887. V THE UNEMPLOYED 203 their typefoundry, and had the same work done ; Mr. Beaufoy got more work done than he ever did before, and needed no extra assistance, except that of three or four watchmen and gatekeepers, watching and gate- keeping belonging obviously to that smaller class of occupations in which the work done is of such a nature that it cannot be compressed into shorter time. When three eight-hour shifts are introduced in place of two twelve hour ones, the change involves more than a mere shortening of hours, and the provision of a new shift, which, if the shift was to be equal in strength to the old ones, would mean an addition of 50 per cent, to the number of hands employed, is likely in any case to be accompanied by some increase of hands, to provide for an increase of production from the work as a whole. When we learn for example that Messrs. Brunner, Mond and Co. on introducing the eight Hour shifts engaged something like 12|- per cent, more hands, we cannot infer from that circumstance alone that these extra hands were required for merely keeping up the former stated production, for they may have been required for getting out an increased production. We are not told which, but the latter seems the more probable from the fact that the old hands have got their old rates of wages back again, so that their old rate of individual production must have been fairly well maintained, without needing any external aid. At some of the gas works the intro- duction of the eight hour shifts was effected without causing any absorption of the unemployed. At Sheffield, 204 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. where the old staff did the same work as before, no extra assistance was needed, and at the Commercial Gas Company's works at Poplar, where the men did only one- twelfth less at first, and have begun to do better now, the change did not cause any more men to be employed.^ In some of the other London gasworks more men had to be employed, but then it must not be forgotten that the gas labourers were, for reasons of their own, not doing their best at the time, and that their deficiencies cannot be laid at the door of the eight hours system or made the basis for a conclusive general inference as to the effects of an eight-hours day on the employment of labour. In the West Cumberland blast furnaces 27 or 28 men were required under the eight-hours system to do the work 24 men did under the twelve hours one, but, as I have said before, this experiment was only half finished when the furnaces were stopped and the physical health of the men was then undergoing such improvement as could not fail to tell further on the result of their labours before long. As it is, those who share the views of Mr. Gunton, ought to observe that while the men's hours were reduced one third, their numbers were only increased one sixth or one eighth, and that with all the incidental exigencies of a new shift. On the other hand, when the three eight-hour shifts were introduced into Mr. Ryland's glass-bottle making works, the men individually, after a little time, did as much and many of them did more, in the shortened day than ' Labour Commission, C. Qu. 2524-42. V THE UNEMPLOYED 205 they did before, so that no new hands required to be engaged at all. On the whole, the experience of the three eight-hour shifts gives no countenance to the expect- ation that any great amount of work will be created for the unemployed by that arrangement. Then, again, the hours of labour are sometimes shortened in times of improving trade, when the work- people happen to be strong enough to obtain what they want ; and though an increase of employment may follow, that increase is generally due really to the im- provement of trade and is apt to be erroneously set down to the shortening of the hours. The case of the Thames barge-builders seems to be an example of that. Before 1890 they wrought 56|to 58^ hours a week and 10 or 12 hours a week besides of systematic overtime in summer, while a fourth of them would be out of work altogether in winter. But in 1890, their union — which contains 425 of the whole 500 barge-builders on the Thames — succeeded in abolishing systematic overtime and reducing the hours in union shops to 54 a week, and that, says Mr. W, C. Steadraan, the Secretary of the Barge-builders' Society, "was equal to putting thirty more men into employment, so that whereas at one time our out of employment benefit was 15 per cent., last year (1891) it was only 5 per cent., and this year it has only been 3 per cent." ^ That improved trade had something to do with the result is shown by the fact that the absorption of the unemployed continued the ^ Lahuur Commission, A. Qu. 20324. 206 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. second year. Granting for the moment that the reduction of the numbers of the unemployed in 1891 to 5 per cent, of the trade was the effect of the shortening; of work-hours in 1890, the further reduction of their members to 3 per cent, in 1892 must have been due to some other cause, viz., to an increasing demand for barges, and the presence of this cause in 1892 suggests its probable presence also in 1891, unless the contrary can be shown, which is not done or thought of by Mr. Steadman. Now there are certain trades, such as the watching and gate-keeping already referred to, in which it is impos- sible to compress the same work into shorter time, and consequently impossible to shorten hours without engag- ing more hands. But these occupations are not numerous; they include, all told, but a minute fraction of the manual labouring class; and even in them, if we turn to experience, the absorption of new hands is not always by any means proportionate to the number of hours reduced. They are chiefly trades connected with transport work, railways, tramways, and shijjs. Now we have seen the hours of tlie Huddersfield tram drivers and conductors reduced from 14 to 8 a day, and the trams worked in consequence by two eight-hour shifts instead of one fourteen hours one.^ What was the effect of that reduction ? Did it, as Mr. Gunton would expect, lead to 100 per cent, more drivers and con- ductors being required ? No, only 50 per cent, more ^ Labour Commission Beport, B. Qu. 18788. r THE UNEMPLOYED 207 were required. Very exaggerated expectations seem to be entertained as to the effects of shortening railway servants' hours. It is sometimes forgotten that a great number of a railway company's employes are engaged in constructive work, and there is no reason why a shorten- ing of hours in a railway company's engineering work- shops should occasion any more absorption of the un- employed than shortening of hours in the workshops of Messrs. Allan or Messrs. Short. Sir George Findlay, manager of the London and North-Western Railway, states that the railway companies of the United Kingdom have 350,000 employes, but of these the census of 1891 gives only 222,583 as railway servants proper, i.e. persons engaged as guards, drivers, porters, clerks, &c., for the working of the line. The remaining 127,000 are engaged in branches of labour in which it is quite possible to make up for shorter duration by greater intensity. But even when the attention seems confined to the workers of the line curious exasfgera- tions appear. Messrs. Webb and Cox say, for example, that a reduction of the average working hours by 20 per cent. " would involve the engagement throughout the United Kingdom of at least 80,000 extra men as porters, shunters, guards, examiners, signalmen, drivers, and firemen ; " ^ and Mr. H. M. Hyndman told the Labour Commission that a compulsory eight-hours day would occasion an absorption of 100,000 unemployed persons on the railways alone. Now, as 1 have just said, 1 Mght Hours Day, p. 130. 268 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. there were, according to last census, only 222,583 persons engaged in the whole railway service of the United Kingdom in 1891, and if we deduct from that figure the 51,752 clerks and officials to whom the re- duction of hours is not proposed to be applied, we have only 170,831 railway servants left. It is obvious there- fore that a reduction of their hours by 20 per cent, could not possibly necessitate, the engagement of any thing like 80,000 extra men, but only at most 34,000, even if the increase of employment was to be strictly proportional to the shortening of hours. But that pro- portional increase is not likely to occur, because in some branches of railway service the work is susceptible of compression into shorter time. Messrs. Webb and Cox themselves mention that " the shunters of goods trucks in busy railway centres, working twelve-hour shifts, do as a matter of fact dispose of 50 per cent, more trucks in the first six hours than in the second," and add that "it is calculated that in one large station this fact implies that the substitution of three eight-hour shifts for two twelve-hour shifts would enable 200 more trucks to be disposed of daily by the same actual working staff, at an additional cost of wages per truck of only 25 per cent." ^ However this may be, it at any rate opens out possibilities of economising labour, which Messrs. Webb and Cox ought to have allowed for in their calculations of the work to be made for the un- employed by shorter hours in the railway service. 1 The Eight Hours Day, p. 103. V THE UNEMPLOYED 209 Then, too, it ought to be remembered that there are thousands of signalmen who are only eight hours on duty now, and that there are thousands more of station- masters and porters at rural stations to whom nobody thinks of applying any hard and fast eight-hour rule at all. And after all these deductions are made, there remains the experience of the Huddersfield tramways still further to warn us that even in branches of transport work, in which the amount done seems to be most dependent on causes external to the worker, the number of fresh hands engaged in consequence of a reduction of hours may be very far indeed from being proportional to that reduction. The natural effect of shortening the hours of work to eight a day moreover is not in the least to diminish pro- duction; it is really the exception when that event supervenes, and as for the most part the same staff does about the same work as before, there is nothing to create any change in the situation of the unemployed, even from the fallacious standpoint of those who imagine a general restriction of production to be a sure way of creating employment. This truth is driven home with peculiar force at the present moment by observing the protracted and per- plexing redundancy of labour which has troubled the colony of Victoria ever since the end of 1 889. The eight hours day became general in that colony in the years 1884-G. Before that time it was enjoyed by no more than twenty trades, but it is now enjoyed by sixty. P 210 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. Three-fourths of the working population of tlie colony work only eight hours a day, yet the unemployed have constituted a worse difficulty in Melbourne since the eight hours day became general than they did before. In July, 1890, Sir Bryan O'Loghlan stated in his place in the Legislative Assembly that there were then 3,000 unemployed men in Melbourne ; in May, 1891, the Trades Hall Council said there were 5,000 unemployed, and that the labour market was worse than it had ever been in that city. In 1892 a Government labour bureau was opened in Melbourne, and in June Sir Bryan O'Loghlan stated there were some 4,000 Melbourne workmen enrolled in it as out of employment, and that there were hundreds more who were in an equally un- fortunate position, but did not care publicly to enroll their names. Out of the 4,000 persons whose names had been inscribed, work had been found for only 100, and Mr. Moloney, another member of the House, said there were then in Melbourne 2,500 workpeople without food or fire. By December as many as 15,000 names were inscribed, and though it was now summer employment had not been found for half of them. In January the Minister of Railways informed a representative of the press that he was then employing 800 or 400 men more than he required, but that he could not think of dis- missing them in such a time of depression. Government is a very extensive employer of labour in Australia, and when the railways are employing this superfluity of hands, we may be sure there is, in all other branches of V THE UNEMPLOYED 211 Government work, a like superfluity of hands whose retention is really a matter of relief disguised as business. Many remedies are from time to time suggested for this distressing condition of things. Government, tired of relief works, which usually ended in fostering the evil they were meant to cure, is now trying to cure it by promoting small farming and village settlements, while the manufacturers for their part have been one after another stating tliat if they would only get an additional protective duty of 40 or 60 or 80 per cent, on the articles they respectively make, they could employ 40 or 60 or 80 per cent, more bands. But nobody thinks of suggesting that any good might be done to the unem- ployed by reducing the hours of labour. On the con- trary, the tramway and omnibus workers, whose hours are at present limited by law to sixty a week, have many of them offered to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day if that would be any use. It is puzzling to account completely for this persistent depression in the demand for labour, but it is generally attributed to the concurrent operation of the great strike of 1889, the great land boom, and the completion of some extensive public works. Whatever the causes, however, it recalls to us in an mipressive way how little even a, very general adoption of an eight hours day can do for the unemployed. A shortening of the hours of work does not reach any of the more common causes of redundant labour, so that it is not really in p 2 212 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. the nature of the eight hours day to do what is so commonly expected of it in that connection. A great strike or a big land boom has necessarily the same effect under a short-hour system as under a long-hour one. The poor cotton harvest and the monetary crisis which laid half the machinery of Manchester idle in 1847 would have done the same thing though the mills had been running eight hours a day instead of twelve ; and the political troubles of France, which in the following year threw multitudes out of employment in York and Derby, and closed altogether the mills of Rouen, received not the faintest check from the fact that in the thick of them the hours of labour were reduced in England to ten and in France to eleven and twelve. The term of English factory labour was reduced on January 1, 1875, from sixty hours a week to fifty-six and a half, and yet, while there were 1,005,685 factory operatives in the kingdom in 1874, there were only 975,546 at the next enumeration in the depressed year 1878. Then of course shortening hours has obviously no power to cure the involuntary idleness incident to occupations dependent on weather or the seasons, or to do any good to that considerable section of the unem- ployed who are not only unemployed but unemployable. A general adoption of an eight hours day will, I am persuaded, be an immense benefit to the working class and to the nation generally. The improvement of the man will involve the improvement of the workman. While increasing his enjoyment in life, it will at the V THE UNEMPLOYED 213 same time enhance his industrial efficiency and lengthen the years of his efficient working life — two invaluable gains for the national resources. But there is one benefit which it is plainly not in the nature or power of an eight hours day to render in any very appreciable degree : it cannot make any serious impression on the number of the unemployed. Yet that is the very benefit which seems to be most ardently and confidently expected from it. Now this wrong expectation arises for the most part from observing the effect of a general limitation of pro- duction in a single trade while all other trades continue to produce as largely as before, and then leaping to the conclusion that the same thing will happen when all other trades shorten their production too. The miners, for example, may play and make something by it so long as all the rest of the world remains at work. They may by a general restriction of their output force their employers to engage more hands to do the work, and even perhaps to pay them a higher rate of wages, because they are employed in producing one of the first necessaries of life which all the rest of the world require and will consent to purchase at a higher price, as long as they are able, rather than do without it. But if all the world is to play, how can it pay a higher price for its coal ? It is quite true that so long as the world in general maintains its old rate of production, the effort of which Mr. Gunton speaks — the world's effort to maintain its habitual consumption — will lead it to give 214 EIGHT HOUES FOR WORK chap. a little more for its coal — of course, however, at the expense of some other and less necessary item in its budget — and so long as it is able to give this little more, the miners may reduce their output and swell their numbers. But manifestly the one condition upon which the very possibility of this effect depends is that the aggregate production of the rest of the Avorld is maintained and not restricted, for if they all produce less they must all possess less to buy coal with. In the same way it is seen how, when a particular trade is busy, when orders have flowed in and overtime has become necessary, a limitation of the hours of work, and a refusal to do overtime, will have the effect of forcing the engagement of unemployed members of the trade. Restricting the work thus tends, it is said, to distribute the work. So it does, and the work is not lessened thereby, because the orders are created by the aggregate production outside the trade, and these orders will continue to flow in so long as that aggregate pro- duction remains unrestricted. But if all trades together were to restrict their output in the hope of distributing the work better, they would find they had merely less work to distribute, and instead of making: work for the unemployed they would have unmade the work of a considerable portion of those now employed. The fallacy in this cruder and commoner form, there- fore, is merely the naive mistake of expecting the same result to ensue after we have removed the principal condition on which it depends. But the fallacy is V THE UNEMPLOYED 215 presented alsu in a less crude form. Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Horace Cox are too good economists to think tliat there could be any increase of work for the unemployed if the aggregate production of the com- munity were diminished ; but they contend, in their interesting work on the eight iiours day, that the aggregate production of the community would not be diminished by a general restriction of the production of all individual labourers now at work, and that it might even be increased, inasmuch as the difference might be made up, and even more than made up, by the work of those who are at present unemployed. The unemployed are apparently to obtain employment from capital which only comes into being as the result of their employment ; they are to provide a handle to their axe from the tree they hew with it ; and if this miracle can be so easily performed under an eight hours system, why should it not be performed quite as easily under a ten hours one, or any other ? Under- neath this form of the fallacy, as underneath the former, there lies the idea that there exists some force able to keep up the normal consumption of society after its normal production is allowed to fall. But the only thing able to keep uji the normal consumption of society, and the only thing to keep up the normal consumption of the individuals, is their means of paying for it — their means of employing labour to supply it, and when those means fail, society like individuals must simply go without and cannot employ more labour. Or 216 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK ch. v perhaps the idea is entertained that if only the State had the management of tilings, all this could be done, but that is equally delusive, for the State could not have the means of employing labour if the means were not produced. The State may do some things on credit at present, because it can get the use of the means from private persons who produce and procure them. But if the State is sole proprietor and producer, it has no such other quarter to fall back upon. If it stops producing the old amount there is no banker outside to advance it the means of employing more labour to make good the deficiency. The eight hours day is not the first good cause that has been promoted by bad arguments, and life itself, perhaps, is only made tolerable by its illusions ; but in the case of the eight hours day it makes all the difference in the world to the practical success of the experiment, whether the working class are to enter upon it with the wrong idea that they are to draw their benefit from a general restriction of their production, or with the right idea that they are, on the contrary, to draw their benefit from doing their level best to main- tain their production, as they have good hope of doing. Odd though it be, the most popular and trusted argu- ment in favour of the eight hours day constitutes really its only serious practical danger. CHAPTER VI EIGHT HOURS WORK AND TEN HOURS WAGES Short hours are sometimes pronounced to be a fruit of high wages : the working man, it is said, has merely got rich enough now to prefer an hour's ease to an hour's pay. Professor Jevons seeks to explain the whole short hour movement on this principle as a natural consequence of the modern rise of wages. The success- ful working man of modern times has shortened his day of labour for the same reason exactly as the suc- cessful merchant devotes less time to business after he has made his competency, because it is human nature to become less willing to work hard when there is less necessity for doing so. After adducing in demonstra- tion of this principle of human nature an example of the contrary operation — that is, an example of men growing more willing to work hard in dear years when their necessities grow greater, and their usual wages have become insufficient to supply their habitual re- quirements, Mr. Jevous pioeeeds to say : — " Evidence 218 EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK chap. to the like effect is found in tlie general tendency to reduce the hours of labour owing to the improved real wages now enjoyed by those employed in mills and factories. Artisans, mill-hands, and others, seem gener- ally to prefer greater ease to gi'eater wealth, thus proving that the painfulness of labour varies so rapidly as easily to overbalance the gains of utility. The same rule seems to hold throughout the mercantile employ- ments. The richer a man becomes the less does he devote himself to business. A successful merchant is generally willing to give a considerable share of his profits to a partner or to a staff of managers and clerks, rather than bear the constant labour of superintendence himself. There is also a general tendency to reduce the hours of labour in mercantile offices, due to in- creased comfort and opulence." ^ Now this theory of the origin of the short hour movement, while containing elements of theoretical plausibility, is not in accordance with the historical facts. It is true, no doubt as a general principle of human nature that after a given standard of require- ments is secured men will then prefer more ease to more wealth, but this preference did not play in the short hour movement so general a part as Mr. Jevons believed, for the simple reason that the working men's standard of requirements kept constantly rising along with their wages, and never suffered them to become practically so indifferent to motley, and so unwilling to ^ Theory of Political Economy, 2niassey, Mr., experience of eight hours day with masons, 80 ; French and English navvies, 148 ; masons, 149 ; effect of good wages on efficiency, 159 Brentano, Prof. , on work in good and bad years, 159 Bricklayers, alleged deterioration in efficiency, 177 Bridges, Dr., on atmosphere of cotton weaving mills, 102 Bright, Right Hon. John, on effect of free ti'ade on English labourers, 149 ; on eight hours day in Victoria, 272 Brunner, Mond & Co., eight hours experiences, 75 Building trades, eight hours, 80 ; alleged deterioration, 177 Bull, Rev. Mr., joins eight hours movement of 1833, 249 ; on its reception by working class, 254, 255 Burroughs, Wellcome & Co., ex- periences of eight hours, 78 Bushill, T. & Son, Coventry, ex- perience of 50 hours week, 84 C. Cabinetmaking, effect of eight hours day in, at New York, 83 r'ampbell-Hannerman, Right Hon. H. , eight hours day in Woolwich Arsenal, 66 Canada, shorter hours in, 37 Caslon & Co., typefounders, eight liours exjierience, 79 Chadwick, Sir E., report in 1833 as to eleven hours day, 18 Chalmers, Dr., on Ten Hours Bill, 318 Chamberlain, Right Hon. J., ex- perience of shorter hours in Birmingham, 38 ; on province of State in labour questions, 319 f'hambers, J., on eight hours in Yoi'kshire mines, 48 Cheerfulness, effect of short hours on, 124 Chemical works, eight hours in, 73 ; effect at Tyneside, 75 ; Gaskell, Deacon & Co.'s, 75 ; Brunner, Mond & Co.'s, 75 ; United Alkali Co. 's, 78 ; Bur- roughs, Wellcome & Co.'s, 78 Chemnitz, competition in hosiery, 163 Chevalier, Michel, instance of re- duction of hours, 32 ; on French and English labour, 146 Cigar factory, effects of shorter hours, 37 ; in Holland, 43 Clarke, Lieut. -Gen. Sir Andrew, service to eight hours cause in Victoria, 275 Cleveland, eight hours in blast- furnaces, 90 ; miners compared with Luxemburg miners, 149 ; Irish in, 160 ; furnacemen com- pared with American, 166 Cobden, Richard, on Ten Hours Bill, 143 Competition, foreign, and eight hours day, 142 ; conditions of, 143 ; reasons of success abroad, 163; between Glasgow and Lan- cashire, 154 Connel, J., eight hours in Fife mines, 51 Contentment, industrial worth of, 122 ; Dr. Ure on, 123 ; effect of short hours on, 124 Cotton operatives, English and Con- tinental compared, 150, 152 ; Glasgow and Lancashire, 154 : English and American, 167 ; English and Hindoo, 170 ; effect of Ten Hours Act on their un- employed, 183 ; rise of tlirir wages at Mulhouse and at Man- chester, 224 ; effect of Ten Hours Index 333 Act on their wages, 228 ; health oi; 102 Cox, Horace, on probable effect of shorter hours in railway servine ou uneniplo_yeu, 207 ; fallacious economic tiieory on effect of shorter hours on unemployed, 215 ; effect of short hours on wages, 223 Crib time, 326 Cutlery, eight hours in, in America, 71 D. Dale, David, short hours and niachini'iy, 109 Darbishire, W. A., 48 hours week in slate quarries, 45 Denny, William, ' inventions by Dumbarton workpeople, 140 Deterioration of labour, alleged, 176 Dollfus, M., shorter hours at Mul- house, 31 Don, Mr., on eight-hours question in Victoria, 273 ; resolution in Legislative Assembly, 277 Durham, short hours in mines, 50 E. Education, effect of short hours on, 133 ; effect of on efficiency, 137 ; Sir W. Fairbairn on, 137 ; at Willimantic Thread Mills, 137 : education and efficiency in America, 139 ; in Germany, 140 Eit;ht hours by legislation, 315 Eight hours day in Victoiia, 258 Eight hours movement of 1833, 244 Eight hours work and ten hours pay, 217 Elliot, Sir G., on mineis' hours of work in Wales and Korthumber- land. 49 ; miners' energj' in Durham and Northumberland, 50 Elliott, E., cornlaw rhymer, joins eislit hours movement of 1833, 249 Eleven hours day in Holland, 30 ; in Switzerland, 27 ; in France, 326 Ely, Prof., education and efficiency in United States, 139 Engineers, eight hours at Mather & Piatt's, vi. ; Johnson's, 56 ; Allan's, 57 ; Short's, 59 ; Keith's 60 ; overtime, 65 ; time taken in stoppages of machinery, 112, 156 ; health, 102 ; eight hours proposal of Society of Amalgamated, 61 ; answer of Association of Masters, 61 ; English and Continental at Arm- strong's, 149 ; French and English, 150. English labour, characteristics, 146, 147 ; on Kouen railway, 148 ; compared with French at machine work, 157 ; compared with American, 165 F. Factory system, cause of prolong- ing working day, 9 Fawcett, Pdght Hon. H., on inter- ference with hours of adult women, 321 Fielden, John, starts eight hours movement in 1833, 244 Fife, eight hours in mines, 51 Findlay, Sir G., number of railway workers in United Kingdom, 207 Fitters, eight hours day, 81 Flax manufacture, effect of ten hours act on unemployed in, 198 Fortescue, Sir J., value of English leisure in fifteenth century, 8 Fox, Mr., manufacturer, on Cork and Manchester textile workers, 160 Frame-work knitters, hours in last centuiy, 5 334 INDEX France, shorter hours in, 31 ; reason for superiority in silk, 163 Freese, Herr, window blind maker, Hamburg, experience of eight hours day. 80 French labour, comparative effici- ency of, 114 ; characteristics, 146, 147 ; compared with English in machinery, 158 ; effect of shorter hours in ship-yards, 161 ; in America, 160 Fuller, Thomas, on immigi'ation of Flemish weavers, 7 G. Gaskell, Deacon and Co., eight hours in chemical works, 75 Gasworks, effects of eight hours day at Sheffield, 86 ; at London, 87 ; at Darwen, 90 Gavernitz. Dr. Schulze, comparison of English and Continental opera- tives, 150, 153 ; work in good years and bad, 159 Germany, short hours in, 32 ; eight hours in mines, 52 ; characteristics of its labour, 146. 148 , its over- lookers, 152 ; efficiency of its labour in America, 166 Glarus, Eleven Hours Act in, 27 Glasgow, efficiency of its cotton operatives compared with Lanca- shire, 154 ; opinion of its Trades Council, 155 Glass, eight hours in glass bottle- making in England, 71 ; in glass manufacture at Dusseldorf, 72 Grad, Karl, on eight hours in German mines, 52 ; English and Alsatian cotton weavers, 152 Grant, Mr. , effect of Ten Hours Act in Nuttall Mills, 24 Gray, Hon. W., effect of ten hours day in Atlantic Mills, 98 ; effect of shorter hours on absenteeism, 120 Greg, Mr., effect of shorter hours iu his mills, 18 ; experience of forty-eight hours week, 45 Guest, R., on decline of athletic sports after prolongation of hours, 11 Guest, Mr., Sheffield cutler, experi- ence of Saturday half -holiday, 41 Gunton, G., eight hours and unem ployed, 180 Guyot, L, value of man, 230 Hadfield Steel Foundry Co., Sheffield, experience of shorter hours, 70, effect of shorter hours on absenteeism, 119 Harris-Gastrell, Mr., on "working sick" in American mills, 121 ; on efficiency of American labour, 164 Healey, Mr., eight hours question in Victoria, 273 ; motion in Legis- lature, 278 Health, effect of short hours in Lancashire, 20 ; Leek, 37 ; Dunfermline, 37 ; Cleveland, 55 ; chemical works, 77, 105 ; better under short and hard work than under long and laggardly, 101 ; of cotton weavers, 102 ; gas workers, 105, 130 ; engineers, 106 ; miners, 106 ; in cotton mill, 119 ; of box makers, 119 ; effect of eight hours on in Victoria, 303 Hearn, W. , education and efficiency, 140 Henderson, James, comparative efficiency of Scotch and Lanca- .shire cotton -workers, 154 Hewitt, Abram, comparison of English and American iron- workers, 165 Heye, M., glass maker, Dusseldorf, experience of eight hours, 72 Hobhouse's Act, 18 HodgkinsoD, Mr., improvement of INDEX 335 Victorian labour under eight hours, 295 Holden, Messrs., of Bradford, com- parison of experience of wool combing in England and France, 114 Holland, Eleven Hours Act in, 30 Hook, Dean, night schools in Leeds after Ten Hours Act, 133 Hopetoun, Earl of, on trade organ- isation in Victoria, 275 Horner, Leonard, effects of Ten Hours Act, 19 ; state of trade in 1846, 187 ; growth of mills in 1847, 193 Howell, Mr., factory inspector, crisis of 1847, 186 Huddersfield tramways, eight-hours day and unemployed, 206 ; and wages, 221 Hyndman, H. M,. estimated effect of shortening railway servants' hours on unemployed, 207 India, competition with Lanca- shire, 171 ; hours of labour, 172 ; characteristics of labour, 172 ; comparison with English labour, 173 Intelligence, effects of shorter hours on, 107, 127, 131 ; in Victoria, 304 Inventors in a Dumbarton ship- yard, 140 Ireland, shorter hours, Londonderry, 41 ; Belfast, 44 Irishmen, poor workmen at home, 160 ; improvement after a time at Cleveland, 160 ; compared with English, 161 ; efficiency of in America, 166 Iron-founders, shorter hours and unemployed, 201 Iron girders, Belgian competition in, 164 Iron mines at Cleveland, eight hours at, 54 Iron-moulders, effect of short hours, 37 ; on unemployed, 202 Iron-workers in Sydney, eflfect of eight hours, 69 ; in America, efficiency of different nation- alities, 165 Irregularities of work, effect of short hours on, 115 ; in book binding, 117 ; hardware, 117 ; at Hadfield foundry, 119 ; at Allan and Co's., 119 Jam works, eight hours in, 79 Jars, Gabriel, hours in English and Scotch mines in last century, 1 Jevons, Professor, high wages the cause of short hours, 217 ; pro- vince of State, 319 Johnson and Co., Stratford, ex- perience of eight hours, 56 Joiners, experience of eight hours, 81 Jones, W. E., eight hours in a London gas-works, 89 K. Kelley, E. D., effect of shorter hours in lithographic printing, 86 Kennedy, Mr., Belgian and English labour, 156 Kynoch and Co., ammunition manu- facturers, adoption of eight hours system, 68 Labour, efficiency of in different nations, 146 ; alleged deteriora- tion of in England, 176 ; effi- ciency in Victoria, 295 Lancashire, efficiency of cotton 336 INDEX workers in, 154, 155 ; in com- parison with Lowell, 167 Legislation, eight hours by, 315 Libraries, started often after shorter hours, 132, 133 Linen manufacture, 54 hours week in, 103 ; foreign competi- tion in, 164 Linen lappers, eight-hours day at Belfast, 44 Linton, A., effect of eight hours day in London gasworks 87; its effect on health and morals, 130 Lithographic printing, effect of shorter hours in, 86 Livesey, G. , eight hours in Sheffield gasworks, 87 ; in Loudon gas- works, 89 Londonderry shirtmakers, effect of shorter hours, 41 Lowell and Lancashire, comparative efficiency of labour, 167 Ludlow, J. M., eight hours day in South Yorkshine mines, 48 Luxemburg, miners compared with Cleveland miners, 149 M. Macaxtlay, Lord, on Ten Hours Bill, 145, 175, 233 Macdonald, A., M.P., on eight hours in mines, 50 McGoppin, Mr. , eight hours day and protection in Victoria, 264 Machinery, effect of shoiter hours with, in Alsace, 58 ; M. Freese's works, 81 ; Switzerland, 96 ; effect of Ten Hours Act, 110; Mr. Chamberlain's experience, 110 ; ilr. W. Whitwell, on machines and efficiency, 111 ; time spent in stoppages of, 112 ; stoppages in Belgian mills, 156 ; in English and Alsatian mills, 150 ; en- hances value of personal effi- ciency, 157 Manby and Wilson, effect of meat diet on French workmen, 160 Manchester, hours at time of Re- form Bill, 9 ; effect of ship canal, 145 ; manufacturers on work in good years and bad, 159 , crisis of 1847 in, 188 ; wages in, before and after Ten Hours Act, 228 Mann, Tom, on machinery and personal efficiency, 110 ; shorter hours to check undue growth of productive capacity, 23b ; his ex- amination by Mr. Gerald Balfour, M.P., 238 Markham, Gervase, agricultural hours in 16th century, 4 Marshall, Professor, probable effect of eight hours day on production, 99 ; on wages, 223 Masons, efficiency under eight houre system, 80 Massachusetts, experience of shorter hours, 14 ; ten hours day in, 26 ; eight hoitrs in, 83 Mather & Piatt, eight hours experi- ment, vi. Miners, hours in last century, 1, 2 ; experience of allotments, 2 ; eight hours day in South Yorkshire, 47 ; Northumberland, 49, 52 ; Fife, 51 ; Durham, 50 ; Manchester, 52 ; Germany, 52 ; Cleveland, 54 ; im- provements under shorter hours, 127 ; unemployed under shorter •' hours, 202 ; rise of wages, 225 Morals, effect of shorter hours on, at Nuttall Mills, 24 ; at Bir- mingham button works, 41 ; Hamburg blind works, 82 ; West Cumberland furnaces, 92 ; South Yorkshire mines, 127 ; Rock Island arsenal. 127 ; Belfast, 129 ; London gasworks, 130 ; Switzerland, 130', Victoria, 305 Mundella, Right Hon. A., on long hours and foreign competition, 12 ; on intelligence of English labour, 147 ; on illiteracy of Nottingham factory hands, 167 INDEX 337 Mimro, Professor, on defective drawing arrangements in mines, 53 ; on unemployed engineers in 1872, 200 N. Nasmyth, James, on time wasted through defective training of the eye, 140 National Regeneration Society, 249 Navvies, English and French com- pared, 148 ; improvement of English, 149 Nine hours day, effects ; 33, T. Birtwistle on, 35 ; Mr. OMroyd on, 36 Night schools, promoted by Ten Hours Act, 133 Noble, Captain, on eight hours day, 61 ; on deterioration of labour, 176 Normansell, J., on eight hours in South Yorkshire Mines, 47 Nottingham frame work knitters' hours in last century, 5 Oastler, Richard, start as factory agitator, 250 ; speech on National Regeneration Society, 254 Oldenberg, Dr., eight hours in Saxon mines, 53 Oldroyd, ilark, effect of nine hours day, 36 Ordnance factories, eight hours in English, 66 ; in American, 68 Overlookers, English and Conti- nental compared, 152 Overpressure, Professor Marshall on, 99 ; Mr. Birtwistle on pushing system in Lancashire, 102 Overtime, general inexpediency, 39 ; in engineering, 65, 201 ; Mr. Bowling on, 65 ; at Green, M'AUen and Feilden's printing office, 84 ; Messrs. Bushill's ex- perience of, 85 ; effects in Massachusetts carpet mill, 98 ; in india-rubber works, 122 Owen, Robert, reduction of hours at New Lanark, 16 ; comparison of results between New Lanark mills and Rochefoucauld's mills in France, 1 7 ; starts eight hours movement in 1833, 248 ; writes eiglit hours catecliism, 251 ; pro- poses eight hours in 1817, 252 P. Painters, eight hours experience, 81 Pease, Sir J. W., on production of Durham mines, 50 Phillips, Mark, on Ten Hours Bill, 143 Philosophical instrument making, comparison of English and Con- tinental labour, 158 Pidgeon, D., quoted, 137, 159 Potteries, long hours and irregular work, 115 Printers, eight hours experience in England, 84 ; in Missouri, 86 ; iifty hours week, 84 Production, effect of sliorter hours on, 14—141 ; in Victoria, 291 Protection, relation to short hours in Victoria, 264 Juarries, forty-eight hours week in, 45 R. Railway workers, estimated effect of shortening their hours on un- employed, 207 Ransome and Sims, effects of nine hours day, 40 Picgeneration Society, National, 249 338 INDEX Restriction of output, 213 Richelieu, Cardinal, working class spoiled by repose, 161 Rogers, Professor Thorold, eight hours in fifteenth century, 6 Roscher, Professor, education and efficiency in Germany, 140 ; nationality in labour character- istics, 146 Rose, Edwin, comparison of French and English labour, 147, 149, 153 Ruhland, Dr., eight hours day and sweating system in Melbourne, 301 Rylands, D. , experiences of eight hours in glass bottle-making, 71 Schoenhof, J. , comparative efficiency of English and American cotton workers, 167 Schuler, Dr. F., effects of Eleven Hours Act in Switzerland, 27 Schulze-Gavevnitz, Dr. , comparative efficiency of English and Conti- nental cotton operatives, 150 ; of English and American, 167 Scotch labour, comparative effici- ency, 166 Scott, Mr., shipbuilder, effect of reducing hours in France, 32, 161 Seaton, A. E., engineer, on Messrs. Allan's eight hours experiment, 61 Shipbuilding, effect of shorter hours in, 32, 161 ; fiftv-two hours week in at Portsmouth and Clyde, 46 Shirtmakers, effect of shorter hours in Londonderry, 41 Short Brothers, Sunderland, eight hours experience, 59 Siemens, Sir C. AV.. on English and Continental labour, 158 Silk manufacture, effect of shorter hours in, 37 ; why France beats us in, 163 ; Ten Hours Act and unemployed in, 199 Slagg, John, M.P., opinion of cotton trade on results of short hours, 25 Slate quarries, forty-eight hours week in, 45 Smith, Adam, eight houj's day in mines, 1 ; workingood years and bad, 159 Smith, Peshine, education and efficiency in America, 139 Smith, Dr. Southwood, report of factory commission on eleven hours proposal, 18 Spill, Mr., on overtime, 122 Spinning, effect of shorter hours in Switzerland, 29 ; English and Continental, 150 Spoiled work in last hour of day, 121 State interference, 315 Steadman, W. C. , shorter hours and unemployed in barge-build- ing, 205 Steel, T. , on eight hours in chemical works, 75 Steel foundry, shorter hours in, 70, 119 Stephens, James, eight hours ex- periment in brick making, 299 Struve, M., factory inspector, on effects of Eleven Hours Act in Holland, 30 Sweating system and eight hours in Melbourne, 301 Switzerland, effect of Eleven Hours Act, 27 Sydney, eight hours in iron trades, 69 Tannery, effect of ten hours day in Swiss, 29 Tariff, relation of to shorter hours in Victoria, 264 Temperance, effect of shorter hours INDEX 339 on, 115 ; West Cumberland blast- furnaces, 92 ; at the potteries, 115 ; in Victoria, 305 Ten Hours Act, effects in United Kingdom, 19 ; Horner's report, 19, 22, 23 : effect on unemployed, 181 ; on wages, 228 Ten Hours Bill, Macaulay on, 145, 175, 231 ; Cobden on, 143 Ten hours day, in Atlantic Mills, 98 ; effect on irregularities of work, 120 Tennant, Sir C. and Co., adoption of eight hours system, 78 Textile workers, English and foreign compared, 150 Thomasson, Mr., on spoiled work in last hour, 121 Tooke, Thomas, report on factory commission on eleven hours day, 18 ; on increase of factories after Ten Hours Act, 24 Tozer, J. , eight hours day in Cleve- land mines, 55 Trade option, 322 Tramways, reduction of hours in Huddersfield, 206 Trenwith, Mr. , carries resolution for eight hours law in Victorian Assembly, 282 Typefounding, eight hours day in, 79 U. Ure, Dr., industrial value of con- tentment, 123 Unemployed, eight hours day and, 179 ; Mr. Gunton's estimate, 180 ; Mr. Abraham's, 180 ; effect of Ten Hours Act on, 181 ; effect of eight hours day in Victoria on, 287 Victoria, eight hours day in, 258 ; unemployed in, 209 W. "Wages, effect of high and low wages on work, 159 ; high wages not caused by short hours, 217 ; effect of short hours on, 222 ; rise of at Mulhouse and Manchester, 224 : at Bradford, 225 ; at Stafford mines, 225 ; determined in rate by producing capacity, 229 ; in- fluence on hours in Victoria, 263 ; effect of shorter hours on in Victoria, 284 Wales, 48 hours week in slate quarries, 45 Watchmaking, shorter hours in, 29 ; English and Continental labour compared, 158 Wates, Mr., Leicester, impossibility of present operatives working faster, 108 Watts and Manton, experience of shorter hours, 40, 116, 129 Watts, Dr., Manchester, effect of good ventilation on production, 103 Weavers, effect of shortening their hours in Switzerland, 29 ; com- parative efSciency of Alsace and Lancashire 151 ; Lancashire and iS^ew England, 1 67 Webb, Sidne}', probable effect of shorter hours in railway service on unemployed, 207 ; theory of effect of shortening hours on number of unemployed, 215 ; effect of short hours on wages, 223 Welsh labour, efficiency of, in United States, 166 White, J. P., coalowner, on im- provement in miners, 129 Wigram, R., engineer, on time spent in stoppages of machinery, 112 WiUimantic Linen Co., effect of ten hours day, 25 Willinian ic Thread Co., effects of education on efficiency, 137 ; of food on efficiency, 159 340 INDEX Wilson, C, Hawick, effects of shorter hours, 129 \A'^ood, John, Bradford, adopts eight hours system in 1833, 250 Wood, Lindsay, production in Durham mines, 51 Woodall, William, M.P., on eight hours day in ordnance factories, 67 Woollen manufacture, effects of nine hours day in, 35 ; foreign competition, 163 ; Ten Hours Act and unemployed, 190 ; rise of wages in, 225 Woolwich Arsenal, eight hours day in, 66 Worsted manufacture. Ten Hours Act and unemployed in, 192 AA'uuderley, Hans, on English and Continental labour, 147 Yorkshire, miners' hours in last century, 2 ; eight hours in, 47 Young, Arthur, miners' hours in last century, 1 ; miners' allot- ments, 2 ; hand-loom weavers, 5 ; work in good years and bad, 159 Young, R., increasing temperance among Northumberland miners, 128 Young, E. A., forty-eight hours week in slate quarries, 45 THE END THE CONFLICTS OF CAPITAL AND LABOR HISTORICALLY AND ECONOMICALLY CONSIDERED. Being a History and a Review of the Trade Unions of Great Britain, showing their Origin, Progress, Constitution, and Objects in their varied PoHtical, Social, Economical, and Industrial Aspects. By GEORGE HOWELL, M.P., Author of " The Handy Book of Labour Laws," etc. 13mo. Cloth. S3.50. COMMENTS. "The work is able and thorough; and though devoted almost exclusively to labor affairs in England, it will be useful and even necessary to all special students of the subject everywhere. 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