they like, and who would only like there were more than twelve hours in the day. Women's wages are very low in Melbourne as elsewhere, and women are therefore willing to work longer than men because an hour's pay has more value for them than an hour's leisure. The English Ten Hours Act was always more popular, both before it passed and after, among the adult males, whose earnings it incidentally reduced, than among the female operatives for whose special protection it was devised. Its advocates had never done complaining of the apathy with which it was viewed by the married women. and the persistent opposition of the unmarried. And in Melbourne the voice of the female factory hands before the Shop Hours Commission in 1883 and 1884 was raised in favour of the long working day, They did not find ten hours in a mill too much for their strength; they were never exhausted at the end of the day, and they much preferred walking home in the cool of the evening to walking home in the heat of the afternoon. Their real preference, no doubt, was for a little more money, and as long as women's wages are low, and even their reasonable requirements in matters like dress are comparatively expensive, women will always give up an hour's leisure for an hour's pay. The Factory Acts of Victoria of 1874 and 1885, accordingly, which provide an eight hours' limit for female work in factories, have remained in suspense from the first at the female operatives' own request.
The history of the movement in Victoria, in fact, is just a history of the successive ripening of an eight hours opinion among the working class, trade by trade. The trades that first obtained the boon—the building trades, who wrought in the sun, and the iron trades, who wrought before fire—looked upon the shorter day as a simple necessity in the Australian climate, which they would not do without, and were quite prepared, if necessary, to pay for by some corresponding sacrifice of wages. Even when they asked for the change in the interests of rational and intellectual recreation, the speakers seemed to lay less stress on the long hours leaving them no time for such things, than on the long hours leaving them too exhausted to care for them. A Ballarat blacksmith said he was very fond of philosophical studies, but after ten hours before a smithy fire in Victoria he was in no condition to apply himself to such subjects with any pleasure. They may have been mistaken, as many people say they were, in thinking the climate of Victoria so enervating. The temperature of Melbourne is very much the same as the temperature of Lisbon or Marseilles; and a climate cannot be really debilitating which has developed so universal a delight in out-door sports, and
