Ironfounders' Society, there have been no fewer than twenty in which the average number of members unemployed has exceeded fifteen in every hundred. The worst point was reached in 1848, when a third of the members were on benefit.* In the case of the compositors, on the other hand, whose society is a local one, and whose trade is for the home market only, there have been only three years out of the forty-nine shown in which the average number of unemployed has exceeded fifteen per cent., and the worst year was 1870, when nineteen per cent. of the members were on benefit.t What the curve shows most graphically is that irregularity of employment due to commercial crises is no new thing.

We are, therefore, driven to the conclusion that whatever deduction from the artizan's nominal income must be made for "short time" at the present day, it is probable that a corresponding reduction would have had to be made from the nominal income in 1837. The statisticians are therefore justified in comparing the weekly wages of the two periods, however uncertain we may be as to the exact amount of the deduction which ought to be made at either of them.‡

It would be beyond my province at the present time to say anything upon the serious problem which this fluctuation of employment presents to the economist and the statesman. But nothing is gained by the assertion frequently made, that it is in any sense a new problem. Rightly understood, the antiquity and persistence of the problem is only an additional reason why our statesmen ought at once earnestly to set to work to find out how to grapple with what is one of the most serious evils of our industrial organization.

* The exceptional perctage of men employed in 1845, and the correspondingly exceptional depression of 1848, denote the growth and collapse of the railway mania, which had an exactly similar effect upon the employment of compositors, though inability to obtain figures earlier than 1848, and the fact that those obtained relate only to the London Society, prevent this from being fully shown in the diagram. It must be borne in mind that, during the period covered by this curve, both the societies have changed from being small minorities of their trades to comprising a very large proportion of the men in them. The proportion of men on the funds would therefore be greater now than in a similar state of trade a generation ago. For perfect accuracy of comparison also, rates, periods, and other conditions of the out-of-work benefit would have to be taken into account.

†The diagram is offered solely for the purpose of comparing the percentage of unemployed members in either society at one period with the percentage so unemployed in the same society at any other period. The two curves cannot be compared with each other, as, in addition to the fact that one relates to a national society with members engaged largely in shipbuilding for export, while the other relates to a local society with members engaged solely in home trade, the figures on which they are based are compiled on entirely different methods. Such a comparison, therefore, could not be other than very misleading.

An even more difficult detail in the comparison is the amount of time lost in hours by workmen in so-called constant employment. Sixty years ago employment by the hour was unknown. The yearly bond was still usual among large classes; monthly engagements were very frequent; and, at any rate, the workman was hired for the day or the week. Now, in some trades, he seldom gets paid for quite his full week's hours, and this constant loss of driblets of his time, whilst it does not appear even in the Trade Union records, must make a real deduction from his nominal income.

Hours of Labor.

But there are other things besides wages to be taken into account in considering the condition of the wage-earner, and one of the most important of these, from the point of view of civilization, is the length of the working day. I believe that the great value of any shortening of the hours of labor lies, as I have elsewhere urged,* not in the absorption of the unemployed, which must, at best, be but partial and evanescent, nor yet in the raising of wages, which is uncertain, but in the increased leisure which the workman gains for life outside his work. A worker who is employed from morning till night, especially if his work is monotonous or without real intellectual dignity, suffers a subtle degradation of character. Instead of a man and a citizen, he becomes merely a "hand." I believe that nothing has so powerfully contributed towards the rise in the standard of life of our wage-earners as the general diminution which has taken place in the hours of labor. The Factory Acts were the salvation of Lancashire.

A hundred years ago the English artizan commonly worked for about seventy-two hours per week. Even this was a reduction from 1747, when in London, at any rate, the bulk of the men worked nearer seventy-five or eighty hours. A rare pamphlet of that year gives us the hours of labor of 118 different trades in London, of which thirteen worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., three from 6 to 7, sixty-one from 6 to 8, thirty-nine from 6 to 9, and two from 5 to 9.† The unregulated greed of the mill-owners in the new textile industries rapidly lengthened the working-day to fourteen and even sixteen hours. One striking feature of this period is the way in which children, usually employed at time wages, were kept at work even longer than the adult workers, among whom piecework was already prevalent. Thus, in 1831, the boys in the Northumberland mines, who were paid by the day, are said to have been kept at work for fourteen to seventeen hours a day, whilst the hewers, paid by the ton, already restricted their shifts to ten or twelve hours each.‡

But by 1837, the ten hours day was becoming generally established as the normal working time of town artizans, and in 1847, the passage into law of the Ten Hours' Bill made it the rule for textile operatives also. Overtime, was, however, still frequently worked in many trades, and the Saturday half-holiday was, of course, yet unknown.

Since that time, Sir R. Giffen computes that the hours of labor have been reduced on an average by 20 per cent., an estimate which seems to me to be rather over the mark. Many people are misled into an optimistic complacency on this point from too exclusive consideration of the textile industries, in which the hours of labor have,

See The Eight Hours Day, by Sidney Webb and Harold Cox (Walter Scott, London, 1891 ✈ 1/-).

+ See A general description of all trades, &c., London, 1747. Copies in the Guildhall and Patent Office Libraries only; The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton (London; 1896).

↑ See An Earnest Address and Urgent Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the oppressed and suffering pitmen of the Counties of Northumberland and Durham. By W. Scott, Newcastle, 1831.

by the operation of law, been successfully reduced by at least 20 per cent. since 1830. But the beneficent protection of the Factory Acts, especially in the matter of hours, has hitherto been withheld from other workers, and the shortening of the working day has been by no means universal. I have, for instance, no statistics of the hours of railway servants in 1837, but I cannot believe that the directors in that year succeeded in getting any more out of the men they employed than did the directors of, say, the North British Railway Company, in 1889. I have elsewhere given particulars of many cases of men being regularly kept on duty for fifteen hours a day,* whilst instances of sixteen or twenty hours' work at a stretch are even now not uncommon. So gross became the scandal that Parliament at last plucked up courage to interfere expressly with the hours of adult men, and the Railways Regulation Act of 1892 empowers the Board of Trade to insist on a reduction of hours. Something has since been done, but the returns compiled by the railway companies themselves, and published annually by the Board of Trade, indicate that the general average among railway workers at the present time is at least twelve hours a day, with a great deal of Sunday labor. The Board of Trade apparently cannot bring itself to enforce an Eight, or even a Ten Hours Day, on the all-powerful railway companies. Nor do the long hours of railway workers stand alone. The Bradford tramway conductor who, in March, 1891, was found to be working regularly for 115 hours per week, would hardly agree with the optimistic conclusions as to the reduction in the hours of labor. And there are many other classes of workers, such as shop assistants, barmen and barmaids, hospital nurses, blast furnacemen, steelworkers and bakers, whose days' labor normally reaches at least twelve hours. The progress of the nation, and especially the enormous growth of town life, have indeed directly tended, in some occupations, to lengthen the hours of labor. Sixty years ago artificial lighting was neither so good nor so cheap as it has now become, and the day could not so easily be lengthened. In 1837, there were comparatively few theatres or other places of evening entertainment, and, especially in provincial towns, folks stayed in after dark and went to bed early. Abundant gas and cheap plate glass have probably lengthened the hours of shop assistants, just as the increase of evening amusements has lengthened those of barmaids, tramway servants, omnibus men, and cabmen; and even where, as in the case of the engineer, the normal hours of labor have in some places been reduced from sixty to fifty per week, this reduction has been largely neutralized by the prevalent practice of working overtime. It cannot be doubted that the nine hours movement, resting as it does merely on the strength of the Trade Unions, has been robbed of much of its advantage to work. men by this means, and in many trades with nominally restricted hours, every depression of trade produces a lengthening of the hours

* The Eight Hours Day. By Sidney Webb and Harold Cox. London: W. Scott; 1891.

Report of the Select Committee on Railways (Hours of Labor), p. iv. (H.C., 246; May, 1892. Price 2s. 8d.)

actually worked. It is therefore difficult to come to any very optimistic conclusion as to the extent to which the_hours of labour have been shortened during the last sixty years. The progress has been very partial, and large masses of workers have still to labor far more hours than is good either for them or the community. It seems evident that if we are really resolved that no worker shall be compelled to spend his whole working life in monotonous toil, we shall have to take more energetic measures than have yet been attempted.

The Housing of the People.

And if we turn from the hours of labor to the workman's dwelling, and enquire what kind of home our civilization affords him, it is equally difficult to give an optimistic answer. It is true that sixty years ago sanitation both for rich and for poor was almost unknown, and that owing to the "Municipal Socialism" of our town councils, the workers have to a large extent shared in the general improvement in this respect. But in the matter of actual room accommodation the statistics of the present day reveal such deplorable shortcomings that one is tempted to declare that things could scarcely ever have been worse. The great crowding into the large towns, which has been so marked a feature of the last sixty years, has gone far to counteract the spasmodic and partial efforts towards better housing. When the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor began its labors in 1884, the Commissioners turned first to a veteran philanthropist who had taken part in every movement for social improvement. Their report tells us that: "The first witness who was examined, Lord Shaftesbury, expressed the opinion more than once, as the result of nearly sixty years' experience, that however great the improvement of the condition of the poor in London has been in other respects, the overcrowding has become more serious than it ever was. This opinion was corroborated by witnesses who spoke from their own knowledge of its increase in various parts of the town."

When we consider other parts of the kingdom we find conclusions which are scarcely less appalling. Much has been done in the way of improvement in various parts of Scotland, but 22 per cent. of Scottish families still dwell in a single room each, and the proportion in the case of Glasgow rises to 33 per cent. The little town of Kilmarnock, with only 28,447 inhabitants, huddles even a slightly larger proportion of its families into single-room tenements. Altogether, there are in Glasgow over 120,000, and in all Scotland 560,000 persons (more than one-eighth of the whole population), who do not know the decency of even a two-roomed home.t Compare with this phase of Scottish working-class life the fact

* See the Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor; The Housing of the Poor, by F. H. Millington (Cassell and Co.; Is.); The Housing of the Working Classes, by J. Theodore Dodd (National Press Agency; id.); The London Programme, by the present writer (Sonnenschein; 2s. 6d. and Is.); The Housing of the Working Classes, by E. Bowmaker (Methuen; 2s. 6d.); Municipalities at Work, by F. Dolman (Methuen; 2s. 6d.); Municipal Government in Great Britain, by A. Shaw (Unwin; 6s.); and Fabian Tract No. 76.

+ Census Returns, Scotland, 1891. (C.-6755, 1892).

lately revealed by an elaborate enquiry into the dwelling houses of Boston, Massachusetts, a city of 311,000 inhabitants, where rents are high. The number of families dwelling in single rooms was found to be only 1,053, or less than 1 per cent., as against Glasgow's 33 per cent.*

Our Scottish record represents indeed some improvement, for in 1861 35 per cent. of the family groups in Scotland lived each in a single room. But the rate of improvement at no time rapid enough-has actually slackened during the last decade. The total number of single-room families positively increased between 1861 and 1871 by over 4,000; it decreased in the next ten years by 27,000, or 11 per cent.; whilst the last decade has shown a decrease of only 18,000, or less than 9 per cent. At the present rate of progress it will take over a century to remove this disgrace to Scottish civilization.

over

In England no attempt was made until 1891 to collect statistics relating to the overcrowding of the people in their homes. But the census returns of that year, for the first time, present such statistics, and they show that while the number of one-roomed dwellings is undoubtedly very much smaller in England than in Scotland, yet there is an enormous amount and a very large percentage of crowding" still existing in this kingdom. Out of a total of 6,131,001 separate tenements enumerated in England and Wales in 1891, 286,946, or 468 per cent., consisted of one room only, and these contained no fewer than 640,410 persons,† or 2-2 per cent. of the whole population, with the high average of 2-23 persons per room. In London 18.40 per cent. of all the tenements enumerated are one-roomed, and even this high percentage is far distanced by Plymouth, where no less than 24'40 per cent. of all the tenements are similarly one-roomed. Nor do these figures even exhaust the extent of the evils revealed. Even a two or three-roomed tenement may be disgracefully overcrowded. The Census Commissioners, who were left to give their own definition of overcrowding, concluded that "ordinary tenements which have more than two occupants per room, bed-rooms and sitting-rooms included, may safely be considered as unduly overcrowded,"‡ a conclusion with which, considering the small size of the rooms in most of the tenements, few will be found to disagree. Of such homes there were enumerated in England and Wales 481,653, or 786 per cent. of the total number of separate tenements enumerated. In these homes lived 3,258,044 persons, or 1123 per cent. of the total population, with an average of 2.81 persons to each room. The distribution of this great mass of people, officially described as living in "overcrowded" homes, is almost

* Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. Report for 1891, p. 567.

Both the number of single-room tenements and the total number of persons living in them seem much too small to correspond with impressions derived from other sources, and it is probable, as the Census Report admits, that this enumeration is inaccurate. On the other hand, the number of occupants per room of the one-roomed dwellings seems too high to be accurate, remembering the large number of single men and women occupying one-roomed homes.

Census of England and Wales, 1891. Vol. iv. General Report, p. 22. (C.7222, 1893. Price Is. 3d.); see also Booth's Life and Labor of the People, vols. v. to viii.