awakened to the hours of labour. This Act also contains an eight hours clause, but permits overtime for special payment to such an extent as shall not make the total time wrought more than sixty hours a week. Occasionally some of the ordinary trades, while they were still working long hours, thought of applying for Eight Hours Acts. The engine-drivers in Melbourne flour mills were working in 1882 twelve hours a day—two twelve-hour shifts; but they had no trade union, and some of them came before the Shop Hours Commission of 1882-3, and said there was no remedy but legislation, because while they themselves believed there was no risk in the reduction, many of their workfellows could not see things in that light. And the bakers, who had already established a union, and even obtained a reduction of their hours by it, came before the same Commission with the same request for short-hour legislation, because they feared they could not maintain even the ten hours limit so long as some employers were still allowed to adhere to fifteen. But before another year passed engine-drivers and bakers were both walking in the eight hours procession, the bakers under a banner on which they inscribed the secret of their success, 'They who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.'
The eight hours system in Victoria, therefore, depends hardly at all on law, but we may say wholly on opinion, on working-class opinion, the opinion of men who want the short day for the sake of the short day, and are willing to purchase it, if necessary, even by a reduction of wages. The advocates of the movement in Victoria never seem to have entertained the idea—I have at least never seen it in any of their remarks—of obtaining the eight hours day merely as a means of charging more overtime; and though I have repeatedly found them, in the early beginnings of the agitation in 1856, harbouring the delusion that shortening the hours of labour was the sure road to higher wages, that idea seems to have disappeared under subsequent experience; for in the movement of 1884 the argument always used by the bakers and other agitating trades was, 'We have been hitherto paying for the short day the masons and the carpenters have been enjoying, let them now pay for a short day for us.' Their hope was to save wages by a rise of prices.
What has been the effect of the eight hours day on wages in Victoria? To all outward appearance, at any rate, it has had no effect on wages at all; it has neither raised them nor reduced them. The wages in all the building trades remained exactly the same from 1856, when they shortened their hours of labour, till
