Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/53

 Rh exercised but very inconsiderable effect on the amount of the workmen's production. A shortening of hours has always two immediate effects—it improves the mettle of the masters, and it improves the mettle of the men. The masters set themselves at once to practise economies of various sorts, to make more efficient arrangements of the work, to introduce better machinery or to speed the old, to try the double shift and other expedients to maintain and even augment the production of their works. The men return to their toil in better heart after their ampler rest, reinvigorated both in nerve and muscle, and make up in the result sometimes in part, sometimes wholly, by the intensity of their labour for the loss of its duration. Victorian experience shows the recoupment almost complete.

There is an occasional tendency, apparently, to a diminution of the number of establishments in a trade after the shortening of the day, but none to the diminution of their gross produce. Probably some of the weaker employers—those with insufficient capital or inferior skill or old-fashioned plant—are forced by the change to go to the wall or to amalgamate with a more enterprising neighbour.

The brewers of Melbourne conceded the eight hours day in 1885; and some of them, as I am informed through private sources, had recourse within the following years to the double-shift system, and acknowledged that while they had looked with great dread to the effects of the short hours before they were granted, they have found themselves now more prosperous than ever. But the effect of the short hours in reducing the number of establishments and of the double shift in increasing the number of hands and of the whole change on the general production of the Victorian breweries may be gathered from the following table, taken from the official statistics of the colony:—

These figures are for the whole of Victoria, and the eight hours day may not have been introduced into provincial establishments at the same time as it was introduced in the town of Melbourne,