Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/38

 18 point of initiation, it must be remembered that the eight hours day is not in Victoria confined in the least to the well-paid trades. It has been adopted in many branches of labour, both skilled and unskilled, in which the usual wages, when compared with the usual cost of living, are worth decidedly less than the wages of the larger and better-paid trades in this country. It is certainly not higher wages that has given the dock-labourers or the tanners of Melbourne a shorter day than the masons and engineers of England; and though the artisans' real remuneration is probably as high in California as it is in Victoria—his money wages is twice as high—yet in California, according to the recent Foreign Office Return on the Hours of Adult Labour, none of even the powerful trades enjoy an eight-hours day except the plasterers, and the mass of the labouring population work longer hours than they do in our own country. Victoria and California are practically of the same age; they are peopled with the same stock, and they correspond in climate, production, and industrial history, yet the one is a ten-hour State while the other is an eight-hour one. Colonial peculiarities, therefore, play manifestly a less important part in the matter than other causes.

One of the most recent investigators into the subject, the Special Commissioner of the United States, Mr. McGoppin, in his Report on Labour in Australasia, represents the eight hours day as a fruit of the protectionist system; but nothing is more certain, when we examine the facts, than that though the eight hours day is more general in Victoria than in New South Wales, the protectionist system has had little or nothing to do with that result. A United States Commissioner might have suspected a conclusion which attributed to the very low tariff of Victoria effects that have never come from the very high tariff of his own country; and as a matter of fact, out of the fifty trades which enjoy the eight hours day in Victoria, the tariff could not possibly have so much as softened the way for its introduction in more than twelve or fourteen at the most, and in these it is impossible to say how far the tariff has been an efficient cause. Nearly half the fifty trades are trades on which tariffs have no operation; they enjoy a natural protection, because their work can only be done on the spot, and they enjoy that protection as completely in ten-hour countries as in eight-hour ones. Such are the building trades, the gas-stokers, sailors, bakers, printers, stevedores, engineers, farriers, wharf-labourers, slaughter-men, scavengers, railway servants, and the various groups of unskilled labourers. On the other hand, the trades which still work ten hours in