Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/826

 04 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL sometimes fifteen but more often seventeen and eighteen hours a day. Occasionally even longer hours are wought for a few days at a time to finish some pressing order, and though the hands are allowed to snatch a little rest by putting a friend in their place, they are fre- quently worn into ill-health, and sometimes, it is distinctly stated, to death itseft. The evidence is very explicit, and the general effect of is has certainly not been misrepresented by Mr. Holt Halleft, whether he has or has not been right in his understanding of some of the details. Of the existence of grave over-pressure in these ginning works there cannot, we think, be any reasonable doubt But in most of the other mills in India there is nothing to compare with that. In Bengal, indeed, where the shift system is general, factory operatives work shorter hours than they do in England The mill runs twelve hours, but the individual operative works only nine; whereas, in this country, if we take ' crib-time' into account, he works too commonly ten. No objec- tion, rdingly, is raised in Bengal to the eleven-hour limit imposed by the new Act on women's labour. he opposition comes chiefly or entirely from Bombay, where mills run from dam to dark, and the women who attend moving machinery have therefore to work in summer their thirteen or fourteen hours a day. Eighty per cent. of the women in Bombay mills, it is true, have nothing to do with the machinery, being engaged for the most part in hand-reeling and the like, and, as it happens, these women work less than eleven hours a day at present; but notwithstanding their shorter hours they still, like the other female operatives in Bombay mills, are generally suffering from head- ache, as was stated to the recent Commission by Mr. Lokhanday, President of the Bombay Mill Hands Association, and himseft an Assistant Commissioner;and the Mill Hands Association asked for a ten-hour limit for them as well as for the rest The present difficulty is about the remaining 20 per cent., and what the mill-owners want and persuaded the Factories Commission to recommend, is to except this particular class of women, who attend moving machinery, from the operation of the eleven-hour clause of the Act. Dr. Bahadhurji, Professor in the Grant Medical College, Bombay, who came to this country at the mill-owners' expense to advocate their views, went indeed a good deal further than that. He would not interfere even with the excessive hours in the dusty ginning factories of Khandesh, and he condemns all short-hour legislation for India on two general grounds. First, he told the Congress of Hygiene that, though definite hours might answer in England, any attempt to fix definite hours .in India must prove injurious, because the Indian people could never fall in with them, since they were accustomed to regulate their lives by the sun, and had no watches. As if what was done every day at the docks and railway works of India could not be done at the mills, and what was done in the mills of Bengal could not be done in the mills of Bombay. But secondly, the argument he and those who acted with him chiefly relied on was the leisurely and intermittent character