THE EIGHT HOURS DAY IN VICTORIA
A week before the May-day demonstrations of last year, at which the working men of Europe and America assembled and cried together to their governments for an eight hours day of labour, the happier working men of Victoria were celebrating the thirty-fourth anniversary of the attainment of the boon. The 21st of April was Eight Hours Demonstration Day, which has now grown to be the national festival of the colony, and drew to Melbourne last year the greatest throng of people ever seen in the city. The usual procession of the eight-hour trades—composed of 8,000 men and representing fifty separate trades—marched through the principal streets from the Trades Hall, the parliament-house of labour, on to the Friendly Society Gardens, labour's beautiful pleasure-ground. Before them was borne the old patched but venerated banner of 1856, inscribed with the principle, 'Eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.' Then came the fifty trades in the order of ballot, each with its flags and music and appropriate historical and industrial tableaux, while the rear was brought up by two drags containing the pioneers of the movement, the last grey survivors of those who fought in its first battles and walked in its first processions thirty years ago. In 1857 only 700 men and only nine separate trades took part in the demonstration, and though they played 'God Save the Queen' as they passed the government offices, they kept the balance right by playing the 'Marseillaise' when they reached the Houses of Parliament; but now there is not a turbulent thought; Parliament adjourns for the day, the Colonial offices are closed, and the Governor-General, after witnessing the show from the Treasury windows, drives on to the Gardens, receives a loyal address as the representative of the Queen, and then, with leading statesmen and some of the largest employers of labour, sits down to a banquet as the guest of the
