Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/36

16 working men. Speeches are made in which capitalists, politicians, and labourers, all rejoice together over an experiment that once caused many anxieties, but which they now acknowledge has, without doing any injury to trade, given the workpeople time to live the life of rational beings, and in the opinion of some of the speakers, has even developed that remarkable love of out-door enjoyments which is now creating a Merrier England under the Southern Cross. Meanwhile, the great body of the procession disperses over the grounds, where they are joined by their wives, families, and friends, and busy themselves with sports, music, and dancing till nightfall. Thirty thousand people swarm about the gardens, but intemperance is not common; and the whole drawings of the day, always a very considerable sum, are given to a public charity as a thank-offering for the blessing whose acquisition is commemorated. Only one shadow falls across the impressive celebration—labour's inevitable shadow, it appears, even under an eight hours system in a new country—the unemployed, a handful of whom attempted last year, as a demonstration that the eight hours day was no general panacea, to break their way into the procession under a black flag, inscribed with the fierce legend, 'Feed on our flesh and blood, ye capitalist hyena; it is your funeral feast.'

It is natural to think that the prolonged and now almost national experiment, which is the occasion of such universal congratulation every year in the community of Victoria, must, if we could only ascertain the facts of it with any degree of accuracy, have light to throw on some of those puzzling questions on which the oracles are now returning contradictory answers. It is true the system has only become general in the colony very recently, and it is not so general yet in Ballarat and Geelong as in Melbourne. The building trades, everywhere the pioneers of short-hour movements—the masons, quarrymen, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, painters, and builders' labourers—have enjoyed it uninterruptedly, though not without severe struggles, since 1856. The coachbuilders also won it at the same time, but lost it in 1859, and did not recover it again for more than twenty years. In amends, however, the iron trades—the engineers, boiler-makers, and iron-moulders—obtained it in 1859, but for the next ten years the only accession to the movement were the shipwrights. From 1869 to 1879 only five more trades joined—the seamen, sailmakers, brickmakers, gas-stokers, and mill-sawyers. In 1879 there were seventeen eight-hour trades in Melbourne, in 1883 there were still only twenty; but in 1884 there were nine new