wickednesses that have been described received, says Plowden, 'a considerable pension for his active services' out of the taxes levied upon a Roman Catholic people. He also, says Froude in his account of the rebellion, received a baronetcy.

I hold that language hardly supplies material adequate to characterise with the severity it deserves such conduct on the part of a Government, with respect to which we have to remember that it was based upon the strictest connection between the Church and the State, and had for its prime object, and its highest glory, the maintenance of Protestant ascendency.

It was before governmental iniquity had reached its climax in 1798 and 1799 that Grattan, retiring from Parliament in despair, after the example of Mr. Fox, explained the grounds of his action in an Address to his electors, which conveyed his refusal to be a candidate at the election of 1797. He pointed out what was even then sufficiently plain, that, so early as in that year, the determination had been taken to subdue Ireland into a legislative union against her will, by a double system of force and fraud, in which these two grand constituents were inextricably intertwined. He held as

follows:

That on the whole, the cause of the Irish distraction of 1797 was the conduct of the servants of Government, endeavouring to establish, by unlimited bribery, absolute power. That the system of coercion was a necessary consequence and part of the system of corruption. And that the two systems in their success would have established a ruthless tyranny, tremendous and intolerable, imposed on the Senate by influence, and on the people by arms.

With these words I conclude. I am fully sensible of the fallibility of my judgments. But I submit my plea on behalf of Ireland with reference to her view of the moral authority of the Act of Union, and my indictment against the conduct of the Government which passed it, to the appreciation of historical students, and of the public at large.

W. E. GLADSTONE.

THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION.

FEW questions are now attracting so much attention among the industrial classes, and the public generally, as the proposal to limit the normal working day to eight hours. About the abstract desirability of this limitation there is, among working men, not much dispute ; but there is considerable difference of opinion as to what is the best practical method for attaining this old ideal. Two plans are before the public. The first, which we may call the trades'-unionist plan, is, that each trades'-union should make a rule requiring its members to work only eight hours a day, under pain, presumably, of expulsion from the society. As, however, nine-tenths of the working classes. do not belong to trade societies at all, the general efficacy of this method is, to say the least of it, doubtful. Consequently an alternative scheme has been put forward, mainly by Socialists, for an appeal to the power of the State. The supporters of this proposal argue that it is waste of time to get up a special agitation in the limited ranks of trades'-unionists, for at best this could only lead to a partial reform, and that the same amount of energy devoted to political organisation would render the passing of a compulsory Eight Hours Act certain.

Before discussing these two proposals more in detail let us consider what are the general arguments for the limitation of the hours of labour. The first and most fundamental argument is, that overlong hours are destructive of the mental and physical health of working men and women. Of course everything here turns on the meaning of the phrase 'overlong,' and it must be at once conceded that this term has different meanings in different occupations. But there is a general consensus of opinion that eight hours' steady and reasonably hard work, is enough for any adult person, and more than enough for a child. At present there are very few trades in which this limit is not habitually exceeded both by adults and by children.

Some of the grosser cases of overwork have recently been made public. Thus we all know, or ought all to know, that omnibus drivers and conductors work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, that the drivers and guards on many of our railways are often on duty for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch, and that the sweated tailors at the East End of London, who make the clothes that the West End wears, are

sometimes kept bent over their work in a poisonous atmosphere for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. But these cases, to which public attention has been attracted, are not really exceptional. There are thousands of men and women engaged in almost every variety of manual occupation who when they get up in the morning know that they must go through twelve hours of heavy toil before they can rest again.

Many women, it is true, are protected from their own folly, or from the tyranny of employers, by the Factory Acts. But these acts only apply to certain specified occupations. Barmaids, shop-girls, waitresses in eating-houses and bread shops, hospital nurses, and charwomen are all outside the scope of the factory law, and may and do work cruelly long hours. It will be found that in most of these occupations the working day is twelve or thirteen hours. There is generally an hour and a half allowed for meals, but this is by no means always the case; very often the girls have no regular time for meals at all, but have to snatch a mouthful when they can. As for men-males over eighteen-they are too sacred to be controlled by law, and so except where there is a strong union, or in factories where women also work, a man must submit to whatever hours his employer chooses to impose.

Now all this is indisputably bad for the individuals concerned. They are kept at work so long that when the day is over they are too tired to do anything but eat and sleep. Such a system is utterly indefensible except on the ground of supreme necessity. If we were all of us busy through the livelong day, working hard to win our daily bread, then no one could with justice complain. But in England this is not the case. For while on the one hand we have thousands of people of all ages wearing out their lives with overwork, on the other hand we have thousands more who are only too anxious to take a share of the work.

The contrast would be laughable if it were not so pitiful. It is indeed hard to say which side of the picture is the sadder. We constantly see notices in the paper of so many people out of work here, so many there, but few readers try to realise what these bald statements mean-the wearying search, daily continued, for something to do, the sinking of heart at each fresh refusal, and the return at night, empty, and to a home that daily grows barer of the little comforts that labour and love have gathered together. Every day in England there are thousands of people making this miserable round, asking in vain to be allowed to work for a bare pittance of pay.

And why are they not allowed to work? Simply because other people are being overworked. There is no escape from this conclusion. No one can contend that there is not enough work to be done in England to keep all of us busy. If we were to share out

the work equably we could not maintain our present average standard of comfort and luxury unless every man and woman worked for at least four or five hours a day. At present some of us do no work at all, others too much. This contrast is the real root of the present social unrest and individual misery.

It is of course futile to hope that such a deep-seated evil as this can be all at once uprooted, but there is no doubt whatever that it can be very seriously mitigated by a reduction in the length of the working day. In order to determine accurately what would be the effect of the proposed reduction we must ascertain the total number of workers in the kingdom, and the time they generally work. Unfortunately the census returns in enumerating the number of persons engaged in the different trades do not distinguish between employers and employed, and therefore we have to make more or less of a guess at the figures we want. The summarised returns for England and Wales are as follows:

I. Professional class (including the army and the navy)
Domestic class (mainly domestic servants)

II.

III. Commercial class (including railway servants)

IV. Agricultural class (including persons engaged about

VI.

Non-productive class (including all children under five,
and 9,000,000 women).

14,786,875

animals)

Industrial class

The class with which we are here mainly concerned is the industrial class, though a reduction of hours is equally needed and might be safely enforced in many occupations which do not come under this head. Bearing this in mind, and making liberal reductions so as to allow for employers and small masters, we may safely say that there are at least five million wage workers engaged in industrial and kindred occupations.

As to the length of the present working day it is even more difficult to form an accurate estimate. Many of the best organised trades, such as the Amalgamated Engineers, nominally work nine hours only, but there is no rule to prevent them working as much overtime as they or their employers like. In many shops overtime is the rule rather than the exception, so that the average in these trades is probably at least ten hours. In the textile industries, where men and women work in the same mills, most of the men have to leave off work when the women do, and thus, by the indirect action of the factory law, the working time of the men as well as of the women is legally restricted to fifty-six and a half hours a week. On the other hand, in industries where only men are employed there is no limit at all, and long hours are often the regular practice. For example, in the seed-crushing trade for the manufacture of oil, the men work in two shifts of eleven hours each. Similarly on the

railways, porters work in two shifts of twelve hours, and sometimes the shifts overlap, so that one set of men have thirteen hours on duty. Railway guards are supposed to have an average day of ten hours, taking long days and short days together, but this limit is on many lines often exceeded, and, in order that there may be no public scandal, the guard is made to feel that he will not be a persona grata at headquarters if he sends in his full time on long days. Lastly we have the numerous occupations mentioned above, in which shamefully long hours are the rule.

From these considerations we may without any hesitation conclude that the average working day of the 5,000,000 people whose case we are considering, is not less than ten hours. Supposing then that we could at once introduce an eight hours day, we should immediately make room for one and a quarter million extra workers. This is a large order, but the probability is that there would not be any insuperable difficulty in finding more than a million people in England and Wales capable of work, and willing to work, if they could get what they would consider fair wages for their work. To begin with, there were in 1887 no less than 110,000 adult able-bodied paupers, maintained at the expense of the community. As to the number of people out of work but not on the poor rates, it is more difficult to get exact figures, but a fair inference may be made from the returns of the trades'-unions. The following list of seven societies includes the three largest trades'-unions in the kingdom; the other four are all powerful societies. These seven are selected out of about seventy societies simply because they alone make the returns in the form required for our present purpose. The year taken is 1887, which was rather better than the three or four preceding years, and about equal to the average of the last twenty years.

Here we are dealing with the pick of the artisans of England. All these six trades represent important industries which are not less regular than most of our industries. All the men who work in them are necessarily possessed of a large amount of technical skill. Moreover, these particular 127,000 men are trades'-unionists, and it is notorious that the best and steadiest men in each trade

The Steam Engine Makers and the Amalgamated Engineers are two separate societies in the same trade.