mvmws 497 sort the account of a number of eight hours experiments given in the appendix ought to be mentioned as being of especial value and interest. The writers are disposed to trace the origin of the present eight hours movement to a possible survival among the English working class of a tradition of the eight hours day which they are believed to have possessed in the fifteenth century and to have lost again in the sixteenth. Mr. Thorold Rogers's acute inference as to the easy hours of labour in the fifteenth century is probably correct, but there is some reason for thinking that the same easy hours continued down to a much more recent period than is commonly supposed. No doubt the Quarter Sessions often prescribed a very long day--twelve hours, exclusive of meal times; but, as Mr. Rogers has shown, the Quarter Sessions' pre- scriptions were habitually evaded. Messrs. Webb and Cox quote from Mr. Rogers the statutory day of labour fixed by the magistrates of Warwick in 1684. It was to be between March and September from five in the morning till between seven and eight at night, with two hours and a haft off for meals; and from the middle of September till the middle of March it was to be from daylight till dusk. But, a century later, the. hours of rural labour actually in common use in Warwickshire are thus stated by Murray in his Report on the agri- culture of that county to the Board of Agriculture: ' Hours of labour from six o'clock to two, and from seven to three in the summer, and afterwards clean each their horses and procure meat for them, clean out the stable and any other thing necessary to be done; in winter about six hours. '! And William Marshall, the agriculturist, writing in 1787, states that eight hours a day was then the usual time for fixed ' labour in most parts of the kingdom, though in Norfolk, where agri- culture was more advanced and doubtless more pushing than elsewhere, the day had got lengthened to ten hours, and even the pace of the plough was accelerated to three or four miles an hour, instead of the one or two miles usual in other counties. ? Of the historical part of the book the least satisfactory portion is the account of the Eight Hours Movement in Australia, which is so defective that it conveys--unintentionally, of course a substantially wrong impression of the actual situation. The authors claim for it the merit of demonstrating ' the falsity of the common assertion that the Eight Hours Day in Australia is independent of legal sanction'; but what they have demonstrated is merely the existence of certain statutes containing eight hours clauses; they have neither demonstrated nor thought of demonstrating that any human being ever got his day shortened through one of them. Three-fourths of the workpeople of Victoria now enjoy an eight hours day, and none of them, as far as I can ascertain, owe it to law, except some of the miners. The Victoria Eight Hours Factory Act of 1874, of which the authors say that it 'only excited at first some discontent, but it gradually became accepted and enforced,' has in reality never been compulsorily enforced z Marshall, Review of the Reports to the Board of Agriculture from the Midlamt Department of Eng/aau/, p. 819. ? Rural Econom!l of 27orfolk, i. 138.
