THE MORALITY OF HOURS OF LABOUR. T HERE will be a
bitter quarrel of class, lasting for years, over this question of the hours of labour, and it will be well if the employing classes, before it begins, clear their minds of two or three unfounded prejudices. In the first place, though idleness is often immoral in a high degree, there is no inherent morality in industry. Bven if the author of Genesis was wrong in declaring work a curse inflicted upon man for his transgressions—and he was at least as near the truth as those who say that work is only a blessing—there is no righteousness in work considered merely as working. The object of work makes its virtue, not the work itself. A man is bound to maintain himself, his wife, and those dependent on him if he can, without sponging on his relatives or neigh- bours, or that corporation of neighbours which we call the "community," and which, because it is a corporation, every- body thinks he has a right to plunder. He is bound to pro- vide for his old age, and in a degree, regulated mainly by his own view of that question, to give himself some means of helping those who are sick, or crippled, or in any way disabled without fault. But, these duties fulfilled, a man, whether workman or millionaire, has a right to lead any innocent life he pleases, the meditative life, or the student life, or even the indolent life, if either of the three makes of him a better or even a happier man. He is in no way bound to go on perpetually adding to the aggregate wealth of the world, which, for all he knows, would be the better for a little more poverty, and consequent need for self- denial and asceticism. The notion that one man is nearer God than another because he makes more corn grow, is nonsense, unless the growing is obviously beneficial, and, moreover, raises his own nature. The most steadily laborious of mankind are convicts, who neither are nor become exceptionally good; and the most industrious of races is the Chinese, which is also one of the worst. A bad. Chinaman, in whose presence half our convicts are saints, will work sixteen hours a day for seven days in the week, and then blame himself as he eats because he takes time for eating. He is but a brute at the end, for all that
"persevering industry." The merit of work is not working, but lies in the object of work, and the proper limit of work, when duties are once performed, is matter for the utilitarian, not for the moralist. Upon this subject, those who work with their hands have, even in this country, where so few males are worked to death, though thousands of women are, much to say for themselves. They plead for eight hours a day aa their proper stint of labour; and we feel by no means certain, if they mean effective labour and a usual stint, not a stint fixed by law, that they are wrong. They may, in the existing cir- cumstances of the world, with its furious competition—a competition hardly begun, for Asia is not yet fairly in the field, and Asia can use machinery as well as Europe—be most unwise, or even senseless, in insisting on eight hours ; but that must be very nearly the limit, if we are to reach any high degree of civilisation. A man is not civilised if he is reduced to a machine, and the Continental factory hand, who works often fourteen hours a day for seven days in a week—we have watched such horn's ourselves in a silk-factory, and they are admitted to exist in the Consular Reports just published—is very nearly a machine. Worked so severely, a factory hand requires eight hours' sleep merely to keep up his vitality at its natural level, and that leaves him just two hours for food, for conversation, and for that waking rest which is the recuperation of the mind. A man so worked gets brutalised, and we should be inclined to say the same of the man who works two hours less, if his work is effec- tive. He has only four hours, one-sixth of his time, for all the purposes of life except working and sleeping ; and it is not enough. Nobody, not the best man, if uncompelled by need, is content with so little leisure. A man can labour, no doubt, from 6 a.m. to 6p.m. after the fashion of an English farm hand ; but if he is to do effective work, he wears out early, and becomes habitually unwilling to cultivate himself at all, or even to enjoy himself except in the grossest way. With ten hours' work he is much better off, though that only leaves him six, of which two ought to be devoted to eating and waking rest ; but with eight—we mean, of course, forty-eight a week—he may be happy; and, what is more important, since he can, as Carlyle intimated, do without happi- ness, he can leave off a distinctly higher and more com- petent creature than he began. That is the true end of arranging work, and it is one which the directing classes do not forget when arranging work for them- selves. How many of them work more than eight hours a day, or, say, forty-eight hours a week P They say they do, and believe it ; but they are not reckoning lifetimes as ordi- nary workmen must. Many a professional man in full practice works thirteen hours a day; but he stops on Sunday; he takes a six weeks' holiday, which knocks off fourteen hours more from each week, reducing the total to sixty-four hours a week, or ten and a half hours a day ; and he works in this way only for a short portion of his life. The workman has to arrange for the whole of his ; and granting that his time is effectually employed, and not wasted in standing about, we suspect his ideal is not a very unwise one. His proper object is not to fatigue himself, still less to wear himself out, but to perform just so much toil as duty requires of him, and secure just so much leisure—by which we do not mean idleness, but disposable time—as that duty will permit. His obligation to employ his disposable time well, of course remains ; but the disposable time is in itself a benefit, not a loss.
But then, is eight hours a stint of labour which it is wise to ask for P That is a question for evidence, and as yet the evidence is most imperfect. Those who have just read the Consular Reports on Continental hours, with their stories of eleven hours' work in some factories, six- teen in others, and eighteen in others (Hungarian private mills), of women "employed thirteen and even fourteen hours a day in loading trucks and other heavy work" (Belgium), of twelve hours' effective labour as the lowest minimum for all men, a. minimum constantly exceeded (France), or even of the eleven hours' effective work which seems to be the customary rule in Germany, can scarcely believe that with an eight, hours day trade could be kept in this country at all. Those, again, who, like the writer, know and dread the frightful competition which all Europe must one day sustain from India and China, where good wages are hardly one-fifth of the lowest European ratio, can hardly believe that any limit whatever, even of ordinary trade custom, is either safe or
expedient, not to speak of profitable to the men, who, with the departure of trade, frequently lose their only means of keeping themselves alive. We neither, therefore, wonder at nor blame those who say that a custom of eight hours' work would speedily ruin England. This depressing view is not, however, wholly borne out by experience. Wherever labour is more than mechanical, and especially wherever willingness tells, it is possible that men working for eight hours can do as much as men working for any longer period. If they can, which is, we repeat, purely a question of evidence to be ascertained by the testimony of unprejudiced experts who have fairly tried short hours, then the men are correct, and their struggle for a customary eight-hours day is not only right —which any day would be, if long enough to enable them to perform imperative duties—but is also wise. The latter, not the former, is the doubtful question, and it ought to be settled, like any dispute in sanitation, or the beet mode of educating boys, without temper, without fighting, and above all without the importation of any cut-and-dry rule founded on a dogmatic morality which has, we repeat, on this subject no existence. That is a man's quantum of work which enables him to perform all his duties, one of the first of which is not to sponge on individuals or the com- munity. It is wrong to avoid work with a duty thereby left undone, but not wrong if the duties are performed ; and the object is to obtain the leisure necessary in order to live the civilised life, which cannot be led when the only alternative occupations are work, food-taking, and sleep. That is the life of an ox, not of a human being. It has been settled by laws that man cannot break, that corn must be grown in the sweat of the husbandman's brow ; but the object of the husbandinan's existence is not the growing of corn, still less the growing of so much corn that, as happened twice in the Punjab between 1855-65, it can only rot in the granaries. He is to become a being with higher interests ; and to become that, he must have the control of so much of his time as the in. exorable claims of primary duties to the family will permit. For wasting that time, he is as responsible as for wasting any other possession, be it ability or money; but his right to it, if his duties are done, is complete.
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