The Trade-Union Congress has been sitting this week at Dundee,
and on Tuesday Mr. Ritchie, who had been chosen president, delivered his presidential address. The address was moderate in tone, though Mr. Ritchie himself advocated the eight-hours rule and the intervention of Parliamentary legislation to secure that limitation,—a policy which, as it appears, the Trade-Unions in general reject. Mr. Ritchie held that this limitation of the hours of labour would cause a demand for the surplus labour of the country. He did not maintain that shops should only be open for eight hours a day; it might as well be contended that railways should work
only for eight hours, or that ships should sail only for eight hours out of the twenty-four ; but he looked to shifts of labour to limit the hours of labour in these cases. What he desired to see was that the Trade-Unions should get their members elected to all corporate bodies, to parochial councils, to Parlia- ment, and should get them seated on the Magistrates' Bench, and in this way, and this way only, the sweaters might be harried out of existence, and railway companies which insisted on their employes working sixteen or eighteen hours a day would become an impossibility.
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