Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/61

 Rh years of the short day, if the effect of shortening the day were, as many persons are forward to assert, to increase dissipation, and not, as others say with more justice, to diminish it. We may take it as certain that the working class of Victoria are not as a body abusing their leisure, though, no doubt, many of them may do so. Leisure, like any other means of good, is in certain hands always pervertible into an equally potent means of destruction, and the eight hours day, while it has materially contributed to the elevation of workpeople in general, has not improbably increased the drunkenness of the drunken. At all events, the statistics of petty crime in Victoria—in which fully half the cases are cases of drunkenness—show that the occupations which have the worst record next to the unskilled labourers are the old eight-hour trades—the masons, bricklayers, plasterers, smiths, engineers—which, however, it must be granted, are at the same time the most arduous and exhausting trades. There is a good deal of poverty in Victoria caused by drink; and the consumption of drink per head, if we may judge from the sum spent upon it per head, is as high as that of this country; but consumption of drink is not drunkenness; and though the working class live liberally, there is certainly nothing like improvidence in a community where, with a population of only nine hundred thousand, the savings banks have more than 150,000 depositors, and the building societies nearly £2,000,000 of yearly income.

Altogether, the more we examine the subject the more irresistibly is the impression home in from all sides that there is growing up in Australia, and very largely in consequence of the eight hours day, a working class which for general morale, intelligence, and industrial efficiency is probably already superior to that of any other branch of our Anglo-Saxon race, and for happiness, cheerfulness, and all-round comfort of life has never seen its equal in the world before. For all this advantage, moreover, nobody seems to be a shilling the worse. It is truly remarkable how immaterial apparently has been the cost of the eight hours day in Victoria. Look for the effects of it where you will, they still ever elude your observation. Wages have not fallen, wages have not risen, production has not fallen except in certain trifling cases; prices have not risen except again in certain trifling instances; trade has not suffered, profits have not dwindled (or we should have heard croaking); the unemployed have not vanished, not so much as shrunk in any perceptible degree; the working classes—the great body of the nation—have an hour more to call their own, that is all. Shortening the day has