Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/574

 552 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL Budget has shown a deficit for the last year or two, and that public opinion is strongly aroused to the conviction that direct Government management, with all its faults, is nevertheless better, because it is itself more manageable, than the management of irresponsible Commissioners. Hence the promised Railways Amendment Act Amendment Bill, which aims practically at subjecting the Commissioners to the effective control of the Minister of Railways, from which the Railways Amendment Act had exempted them. MRs. i:)ECHEY PHIPSON writes tO the Times that the first effect of the new Indian Factory Act limiting the work of women to eleven hours a' day is that mill owners are preparing to dispense with the service of women altogether as opportunity occurs, and she raises once again the old alarm that the only result of the interference will be to drive women from the lighter work of the mill to more severe and brutalising work, like that of the paddy field. Such a result has never ensued in this country, though it has always been prophesied. Women hold their place in our mills as securely after the Factory Acts as before them, because employers have always found they did about as much work in the shorter day as in the longer, and Mrs. Pechey Phipson states facts, from her own knowledge of Indian factory life, which show there is no impossibility of the same thing happening in that. country. Indian mill workers seem never under the former system to have actually wr.ought eleven hours a day or anything like it, for says Mrs. Pechey Phapson, 'they could always get a day off, and they left their work for a few minutes whenever they liked in charge of their companion and went out for a chat, or a drink, or to take their food.' This easy and intermittent habit of working is no exclusively oriental peculiarity, it is a constant and even necessary feature of the long-hour system everywhere. As steadier application always comes in with shorter hours, why should it not come in' India, where there is apparently so much room for it ? THE first chapter of the Annual Review of Indian Trade, which has just been issued, summarises the prominent tracle features of the year. One such feature is the phenomenal variation in the price of silver and the consequent range of exchange. The quickly rising exchange gave a temporary stimulus to importation. But the total trade for 1890 91 .imports and exports together shows an increase of only about  per cent. over the total trade for 1889 90, while the average rate of increase in the four preceding years was 5 per cent. The expan. sion of trade during the decade 1881 1891 has been about four tames more rapid than the expansion of population. The value of the total trade for 1890 91, Rx. 193,134,966, is at the rate of nearly seven rupees per head of the population, which, according to the Census of