Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/42

 22 produced athletes like the cricketers and scullers of Australia. But whether the idea was mistaken or no, it undoubtedly had a principal influence in creating in these trades their original determination in favour of short hours. It was always the main plea of the pioneers of the movement. A joiner, who had wrought in the West Indies and in Brazil, said he found it far more trying to work in Victoria than to work in those countries. Doctors came forward, both at Melbourne and at Ballarat, and declared ten hours a day in the glaring sun of Australia was deadly, and left a man fit for nothing but drink or sleep. Many of the employers, too, having been themselves workmen when they first settled in the colony, agreed the more readily to the shortening of the day because they admitted, from their own personal experience, that eight hours a day was long enough for any man to labour in that climate in the open air. And it is certain that the masons, slaters, plasterers, and bricklayers are the most unhealthy of the skilled trades in Victoria, except the dyers, whereas in this country many other trades are more unhealthy. Victorian statistics on the subject only exist for the three years 1880—1882; but, according to the mean of these years, while the general death-rate of Victoria was 14·73 per 1,000, the death-rate of the masons, slaters, plasterers, and bricklayers was 25·43 per 1,000. The masons complained much too that the stone of Victoria was particularly hard to work.

In these trades, therefore, the eight hours question never really was a wages question at all. The men were willing from the first to purchase the reduction of hours by a sacrifice of wages. When they began their agitation in 1856 their wages had fallen to half what they were two years before, and, as we learn from official figures, they went a much less way in the purchase of commodities than labourers' wages have ever gone in that colony either before or since; but the men freely offered their employers to take a shilling a day less wages until the expiry of existing contracts. And when a further, and, indeed, very serious fall of wages became inevitable in 1859, they still steadfastly refused to break that fall in the least by returning to long hours; and through all the bitter and protracted conflict of that year they held immovably by the position that wages were matters for arrangement, but on the eight hours day there should be no surrender. This conflict of 1859 was the real fight for the eight hours day, and it was one of the severest in the annals of labour. In 1856 the eight hours day had been won almost without a struggle. There was neither strike nor street demonstration.