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Bryan O'Loghlan stated in his place in the Legislative Assembly that there were then 3000 unemployed men in Melbourne; in May 1891 the Trades Hall Council said there were 5000 unemployed, and that the labour market was worse than it had ever been in that city. In 1892 a Government labour bureau was opened in Melbourne, and in June Sir Bryan O'Loghlan stated there were some 4000 Melbourne workmen enrolled in it as out of employment, and that there were hundreds more who were in an equally unfortunate position, but did not care publicly to enrol their names. Out of the 4000 persons whose names had been inscribed, work had been found for only 100, and Mr. Moloney, another member of the House, said there were then in Melbourne 2500 workpeople without food or fire. By December as many as 15,000 names were inscribed, and though it was now summer employment had not been found for half of them. In January the Minister of Railways informed a representative of the press that he was then employing 300 or 400 men more than he required, but that he could not think of dismissing them in such a time of depression. Government is a very extensive employer of labour in Australia, and when the railways are employing this superfluity of hands, we may be sure there is, in all other branches of Government work, a like superfluity of hands whose retention is really a matter of relief disguised as business. The Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company came to a decision in February that in the existing state of trade there must either be a general reduction of hands on all lines or a general reduction of wages they have in the meantime adopted the latter alternative as the more humane; and a spokesman of the directors told a deputation of the employés that no improvement could be expected in the next five months. It was probable, he said, that the coming winter would be a worse one than any they had had before; the Tramway Company were dependent on the masses for their business, and as work at the brickyards, manufactories, and quarries was nil or very meagre their receipts had suffered greatly.

Many remedies are from time to time suggested for this distressing condition of things. Government, tired of relief works, which usually ended in fostering the evil they were meant to cure, has proposed to promote small farming by repurchasing considerable blocks of land near the larger centres of population, and letting or selling them in small holdings to approved occupiers on reasonable terms, while the manufacturers for their part have been one after another stating that if they would only get an additional protective duty of 40 or 60 or 80 per cent. on the articles they respectively make, they could employ 40 or 60 or 80 per cent. more hands. But nobody thinks of suggesting that any good might be done to the unemployed by reducing the hours of labour. On the contrary, the tramway and omnibus workers, whose hours are at present limited by law to sixty a week,

have many of them offered to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day if that would be any use.

It is puzzling to account completely for this persistent depression in the demand for labour, but it is generally attributed to the concurrent operation of the great strike of 1889, the great land boom, and the completion of some extensive public works. Whatever the causes, however, it recalls to us in an impressive way how little even a very general adoption of an eight hours' day can do for the unemployed. A shortening of the hours of labour does not reach any of the more common causes of redundant labour, so that it is not really in the nature of the eight hours' day to do what is so commonly expected of it in that connection. A great strike or a great land boom has necessarily the same effect under a short-hour system as under a long-hour one. The poor cotton harvest and the monetary crisis which laid half the machinery of Manchester idle in 1847 would have done the same thing though the mills had been running eight hours a day instead of twelve; and the political troubles of France, which in the following year threw multitudes out of employment in York and Derby, and closed altogether the mills of Rouen, received not the faintest check from the fact that in the thick of them the hours of labour were reduced in England to ten and in France to eleven and twelve. The term of English factory labour was reduced on January 1, 1875, from sixty hours a week to fifty-six and a half, and yet, while there were 1,005,685 factory operatives in the kingdom in 1874, there were only 975,546 at the next enumeration in the depressed year 1878. Then of course shortening hours has obviously no power to cure the involuntary idleness incident to occupations dependent on weather or the seasons, or to do any good to that considerable section of the unemployed who are not only unemployed but unemployable.

A general adoption of an eight hours' day will, I am persuaded, be an immense benefit to the working class and to the nation generally. The improvement of the man will involve the improvement of the workman. While increasing his enjoyment in life, it will at the same time enhance his industrial efficiency and lengthen the years of his efficient working life-two invaluable gains for the national resources. But there is one benefit which it is plainly not in the nature or power of an eight hours' day to render in any very appreciable degree: it cannot make any serious impression on the number of the unemployed. Yet that is the very benefit which seems to be most ardently and confidently expected from it.

Now this wrong expectation arises for the most part from observing the effect of a general limitation of production in a single trade. while all other trades continue to produce as largely as before, and then leaping to the conclusion that the same thing will happen when

all other trades shorten their production too. The miners, for example, may play and make something by it so long as all the rest of the world remains at work. They may by a general restriction of their output force their employers to engage more hands to do the work, and even perhaps to pay them a higher rate of wages, because they are employed in producing one of the first necessaries of life which all the rest of the world require and will consent to purchase at a higher price, as long as they are able, rather than do without it. But if all the world is to play, how can it pay a higher price for its coal ? It is quite true that so long as the world in general maintains its old rate of production, the effort of which Mr. Gunton speaksthe world's effort to maintain its habitual consumption-will lead it to give a little more for its coal-of course, however, at the expense of some other and less necessary item in its budget-and so long as it is able to give this little more, the miners may reduce their hours and swell their numbers. But manifestly the one condition upon which the very possibility of this effect depends is that the aggregate production of the rest of the world is maintained and not restricted, for if they all produce less they must all possess less to buy coal with.

In the same way it is seen how, when a particular trade is busy, when orders have flowed in and overtime has become necessary, a limitation of the hours of work, and a refusal to do overtime, will have the effect of forcing the engagement of unemployed members of the trade. Restricting the work thus tends, it is said, to distribute the work. So it does, and the work is not lessened thereby, because the orders are created by the aggregate production outside the trade, and these orders will continue to flow in so long as that aggregate production remains unrestricted. But if all trades together were to restrict their output in the hope of distributing the work better, they would find they had merely less work to distribute, and instead of making work for the unemployed they would have unmade the work of a considerable portion of those now employed.

The fallacy in this cruder and commoner form, therefore, is merely the naïve mistake of expecting the same result to ensue after we have removed the principal condition on which it depends. But the fallacy is presented also in a less crude form. Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Horace Cox are too good economists to think that there could be any increase of work for the unemployed if the aggregate production of the community were diminished; but they contend, in their interesting work on the Eight Hours' Day, that the aggregate production of the community would not be diminished by a general restriction of the production of all individual labourers now at work, and that it might even be increased, inasmuch as the difference might be made up, and even more than made up, by the work of those who

are at present unemployed. The unemployed are apparently to obtain employment from capital which only comes into being as the result of their employment; they are to provide a handle to their axe from the tree they hew with it; and if this miracle can be so easily performed under an eight hours' system, why should it not be performed quite as easily under a ten hours' one, or any other? Underneath this form of the fallacy, as underneath the former, there lies the idea that there exists some force able to keep up the normal consumption of society after its normal production is allowed to fall. But the only thing able to keep up the normal consumption of society, and the only thing to keep up the normal consumption of individuals, is their means of paying for it-their means of employing labour to supply it, and when those means fail, society like individuals must simply go without and cannot employ more labour. Or perhaps the idea is entertained that if only the State had the management of things, all this could be done, but that is equally delusive, for the State could not have the means of employing labour if the means were not produced. The State may do some things on credit at present, because it can get the use of the means from private persons who produce and procure them. But if the State is sole proprietor and producer, it has no such other quarter to fall back upon. If it stops producing the old amount there is no banker outside to advance it the means of employing more labour to make good the deficiency.

The eight hours' day is not the first good cause that has been promoted by bad arguments, and life itself, perhaps, is only made tolerable by its illusions; but in the case of the eight hours' day it makes all the difference in the world to the practical success of the experiment, whether the working class are to enter upon it with the wrong idea that they are to draw their benefit from a general restriction of their production, or with the right idea that they are, on the contrary, to draw their benefit from doing their level best to maintain their production, as they have good hope of doing. Odd though it be, the most popular and trusted argument in favour of the eight, hours' day constitutes really its only serious practical danger.

JOHN RAE.

THE CHURCH IN WALES.

AN ALIEN CHURCH.

sisestablished

THE position of the Anglican Church in Wales has lately received

a great share of public attention. The opponents of Church establishment claim that the Church of England is regarded as an alien institution by a large majority of the inhabitants of Wales. Church apologists, unable to deny that the mass of Welshmen are estranged from the Church, have replied by proving that the Church in Wales is at any rate not alien in origin. That fact, so far as I am aware, has not been seriously questioned. No one will dispute the ability of the Church of England in Wales to trace its descent from the ancient British Church established in these islands by the Christian missionaries of the second century. But when the charge of alienism is made against the Church in Wales, it is not meant primarily or chiefly in an historical sense. All practical men will feel that if the Anglican Church can be proved to be at the present day out of sympathy with the Welsh people, if she is not now doing the work of a national Church, it is worse than futile to assert that seventeen centuries ago, or even two centuries ago, she was the Church of the Welsh people. It is the purpose of this article to show the actual position of the Church in Wales to-day, and to explain the causes that have led to her occupying that position.

The history of the Church in Wales teaches one lesson very plainly -namely, that whenever the Church has acted in sympathy with Welsh ideas and sentiments, she has been able to command the enthusiastic devotion of the Welsh people, and that when she has failed to attract their homage, it has been owing to an Anglicising and anti-national policy, thrust upon her in the main, it is true, by her English rulers. This policy of Anglicisation began at the Conquest. Norman bishops were forced upon Welsh sees as they were upon

VOL. LXIII.

3 H

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