WHAT IS "A FAIR DAY'S WORK "?
THE extraordinary strength of the modern desire for more leisure is curiously illustrated by the accounts of the existing strike at Oldham. Thirty thousand workmen in the cotton trade there earn 140,000 a week, or an average of 5s. 6d. a head for every working day, yet they have agreed to a strike involving a tempo- rary loss of the whole sum, rather than forego a demand for two hours more of holiday in the week. They want to leave off at noon instead of 2 o'clock on Saturdays, and the masters are un- willing to give more than a single hour. Of course, the general dislike of men to be beaten, and the particular dislike of factory hands to give way to the masters, enter into the struggle ; but the ultimate motive of the contest, the justification for the severe sacri- fices involved, is apparently a genuine desire to obtain more time for themselves, to diminish the number of hours devoted to a monoto- nous toil. The same inclination, one almost entirely new to the modern world, is displaying itself in almost every country where work is performed through great associations of men. In America the eight-hour movement threatened very recently to break up an administration, and but for the multitude of farmers with votes it would, we believe, have done so ; while in England, the Trades show a disposition to fight about hours at least as keenly as about wages. The most dangerous strike that ever occurred in the Building trade of London was on a question of hours, and the early-closing movement has been fought out in half our county towns by applying to employers the coercion of the brick-bat. Every four or five years an attempt is made in London to secure a little more holiday, and we should not be surprised within the next ten years to see London as strictly shut up on the Saturday as the Sunday. Even in the agricultural districts, where the labourers are so much influenced by immemorial custom, a contest is beginning between the men and the farmers—in which the latter are in the wrong, as they ask too many hours for their men to give honest work—and if the labourers ever combine, they will to a certainty reduce the day's work one-sixth. In France, one of the fixed ideas of the city workmen is a reduction in hours, and almost the only "communistic" order yet given by the Commune was one prohibiting night-work in the bakeries as an oppression of the poor for the sake of the senseless luxury of early hot bread. The Parisian workman too, an essentially industrious man, who will when "co-operated" toil like a slave, is said to enjoy his recent freedom from labour so greatly that one of the diffi- culties of regular government is to compel him to resume work, and it is believed that thousands will never again work as they have been accustomed to do. Nor is the movement confined to those who labour for daily pay. There is a distinct increase in the reluctance of the English professional classes to wear them- selves out, as they say, except for excessive rewards; in every office the first inquiry of candidates is about hours of attendance, and badly-paid positions which allow of leisure are subjects of the most determined competition. The Yankees proper, who are in many respects the typical men of our race, who are very eager for gain, and who of all men have least of the idle gladsomeness which tempts young men to enjoy existence without action, abso- lutely will not work except on the land, will take any wages for "superintending," that is, for moderate mental exertion, in pre- ference to double the money for strenuous, continuous toil. Pre- cisely the same spirit is at the bottom of the place-hunting which among the Latin races has risen into a mania, and, as we suspect, of the unreasoning rage which in England follows every reduction in the number of Government clerks. The workmen when dis- missed lose their work, and if fresh work is at hand do not mind ; but the clerks have to change employment which allows of much leisure for positions which, though usually better paid, admit of very much less, and they writhe under the extra burden. We
suppose we must not quote the iniquitous rules maintained by some trades, more especially bricklayers, against hard work, as a further illustration, for the men argue that those rules are intended to prevent the oppression of slower workmen, but still it is certain that every year work is more lazily done.
We wish we could feel sure that this tendency to indolence was altogether a tendency for good, but we are not sure. That it was inevitable we freely admit, for work as our fathers understood work absorbed life far too much, occupied, in fact, the whole of it, made cultivation impossible, and tended to reduce the majority of mankind into mere producing-machines. Resistance to that system was wise, and we do not know that resistance as to hours has as yet gone at all too far. We should be inclined in the main to agree with the American theory that forty-eight hours' work a week is the utmost that ought to be extorted from any- body, and that forty-two hours would be much nearer the most expedient stint. But for the drink, two holidays, or at all events easy days, in the week, would be a real gain to mankind, and so would the undisturbed possession of time after 4 p.m. But we have a disagreeable impression that the growing demand for leisure does not proceed so much from a love of it, as from a change of feeling about industry, and especially about industry under discipline, which not only produces an aversion to long hours, but an aver- sion to make up the loss by extra exertion in short ones. We note that men who work for themselves, whether as pea- sants, or little shopkeepers, or artizans working at home by the piece, keep very long hours, and are entirely unwilling to sacrifice the money which operatives at Oldham throw so cheerfully into the gutter. That looks very much as if im- patience of discipline, of taking orders, of control generally were entering into the movement, and there is no worse sign. We note also that the Trades never offer to do as much work in the time they fix as in the time the masters fix—an offer they certainly could make—and we hear on all sides, in town and country alike, that the pace of work is relaxing and loitering becoming the rule. That looks like dislike of industry as a disagree- able thing, as if the old feeling that work steadily pursued was a relief, a continuous pleasure, such as it certainly is still to artists and all who create, were dying out, and Europe were falling into the opinion of Asia, that to do nothing is of itself preferable to doing anything, that men to be as gods should be indolent, satis- fied, "careless of mankind." We cannot imagine a state of feel- ing more dangerous for civilization. If there is one thing certain in this world, it is that the vast majority of men must labour, not only in order to subsist, but in order to keep themselves in mind and body under healthy self-discipline ; that a nation of idlers, however cultivated or however happy, would very soon become a nation of vicious self-indulgents. The saunterer is never good for long, and it is towards sauntering, and not towards control of one's own footsteps, that much of the short-hours' movement tends.
We wish the philanthropists who fight for the workmen, and still more the men who lead them, would think out one point which is still unsettled, and on which they and the professional classes seem instinctively to differ. Professional men fighting for holidays always prefer whole days, workmen fighting for holidays always prefer, or at all events seem to prefer, parts of days, —ask for short hours rather than for holidays. Is it quite certain that the workmen are wise? We know quite well what will be said about the temptations of an idle day, about the drink, and the loaf- ing, and so on, and the way in which the suspension of work for all Sunday results in its suspension for St. Monday also. But, after all, we must act with some regard to what is abstractedly best, and the short-hour system has in it at least three objectionable features. Firstly, working-men are pretty sure to waste any snippets of a day they may get, while they are sure not to intend to waste a whole day. Secondly, it is only by working full power for a good long time that a man brings out clearly to himself his power of work, begins to appreciate clearly the pleasure and root of glad- someness which, as we maintain, lives in toil, and of which the
idler is entirely deprived. The love of industry, the beat antiseptic in human character, only comes of industry, and lazy work for short hours is not industry. And finally, the wife, who is scarcely so much benefited as extra burdened by the short hours, who gets nothing out of them except one'more in the house- hold to attend to, can benefit by the whole holiday almost as much as her husband; and after all, if leisure is good, if it be not, as the Puritans used to think, a waste of the mercies, it must be good for the women too.
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