Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/39

Rh Melbourne are almost all protected trades. Then the sail-makers, who have never been protected, have had the eight hours day for a quarter of a century, and the carpenters, iron-moulders, boiler-makers, and smiths, though now protected to some extent, enjoyed the eight hours day for a good many years before there was a protective tariff in the colony; while the coachbuilders, who possessed the eight hours day for a time and lost it again before the tariff was introduced, were not enabled by eighteen years of protection to recover what they lost.

The Victorian tariff was first introduced in 1866, when a series of low duties were imposed running from 5 to 10 per cent. ad valorem, and the principal subsequent changes have occurred in 1874, when the duties were raised, most of them to 20 per cent., in 1883, when they were further raised to 25 per cent., and finally, in 1889, when some of them were again raised to 35 per cent. This last rise has as yet led to no result, not a single new trade having joined the movement last year; but what is more important to observe, only one protected trade, the brickmakers, joined it in the long period between 1866 and 1883. In that latter year twenty trades walked in the annual procession, nineteen of which had come into the eight hours system without any possible assistance from the tariff, and the accession of the twentieth cannot be reasonably ascribed to an influence which was in operation for seventeen years without producing the effect. Yet because thirty new trades joined the movement in rapid succession between 1884 and 1888, it has been thought that this fresh start must have been due to the small rise of 5 per cent. which the tariff underwent in 1883. But of these thirty accessions, ten were trades like the printers and wharf-labourers, for example, which were not protected at all, and six more, though protected, got no rise of duty at that particular time.

It is impossible, therefore, to trace the origin of this fresh movement to a tariff revision in which only a minority of trades who moved had any interest. Its true origin was in the fresh impetus given to opinion by the evidence taken before the Commission on Shop Hours in 1882 and 1883. The movement began among the bakers—a trade with no concern in tariffs except to a trifling degree in the matter of biscuits—and several of the Melbourne bakers stated expressly, when they appeared as witnesses before that Commission in 1883, that this agitation had been set agoing by the impression made upon them and their workfellows by the evidence given to the Commission in the end of 1882. Before then the bakers of Melbourne had been working