Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/55

 Rh The coachmakers introduced the eight hours day in 1883 or 1884 (I am unable to ascertain more exactly), and have gone on steadily ever since increasing the number of their establishments, the number of hands employed, the general amount of their product, and as is also the case in most of the other examples I have adduced, the amount of product per hand employed.

Of course, differences in the value of the product are not the same thing as differences in its amount, and the figures must be taken for what they are worth. Only I think they tend to support the conclusion that the shortening of the day to eight hours has not been followed by any corresponding loss of product, but rather—whatever it be due to—by an increase of product, and even by an increase per hand employed. Much of that result flows, no doubt, from better management on the part of the employers and other general causes of progress, but much of it also undoubtedly arises from an improvement in the industrial efficiency of the artisans themselves, the direct effect of the leisure they have acquired.

It is almost a universal opinion in the colony that the men work harder now while they are at their work, and that they turn out work of a better quality than they did under the long-hour system. Mr. Hodgkinson, a public man of Victoria, said in his speech at the eight hours demonstration of 1873 that he had often watched men working in the Public Gardens, and that though left to themselves very much they worked as well as when under contractors, that the Government stroke was unknown among them, and that he was convinced they did more work now in the eight hours day than they did before in the ten. A very recent writer, Mr. Charles Fairfield, speaks of the 'go' which is conspicuous in some of the out-door trades of Victoria. 'The leisure enjoyed by colonial workmen, their brisk, cheerful,