PREVENTIVES OF EXCESSIVE LABOUR.
Tam Morning Post attributes to " want of proper feeling" our opinion that it is in vain to expect legislation to prevent working long hours. The proper feeling here intimated is that which is shocked at the cruelty of a physician who advises his patients to abstain from a quack-medicine that can do them no good. Working long hours is but one of the consequences or symptoms of the social disease, not the disease itself. To dream of curing the disease by prohibiting the appearance of the symptom, is about as wise as to fancy a consumption may be cured by forbidding the patient to cough. It is because there are more milliners than remunerative employment—because these unfortunates try to drive each other out of the market by each undertaking to work longer than her neighbour for the same wages—that the hours are so long. A law shortening the hours of labour would raise the price of dresses, and leave more unemployed. A law prohibiting long hours can decide whether milliners are to die of overwork or inani- tion; but it cannot make them live in comfort. Is it "want of proper feeling " to proclaim this heartfelt conviction, and advise the patient to relinquish the quack medicine and seek a real re- medy? We repeat, that the only remedy for the diseased state of our social system, of which long hours of labour among milliners and other classes is only a symptom, must be sought in the readjust- ment of the deranged economical system of the country,—by re- moving those restrictions on industry and commercial enterprise which narrow the labour-market ; by distributing capital and labour more equally over the British territories through the medium of efficient colonization ; and, we may add, by a system of national edu- cation, to teach the people when they shall have got well to keep well.
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