eight hours legal day; whatever may be said as to the effect that an enactment in this sense would have, the demand at any rate expresses the desire of the workmen to manage their own affairs, 272 and to curtail the power of the capitalist class.
Moreover, it is a demand which can only be sustained with the collaboration of the workmen of Europe at least, if not of all civilisation, so that it has the further advantage of bringing the British proletarian into friendly contact with his continental brother for the furtherance of a tangible and immediate common gain.
A necessary accompaniment of the wages and capital system, with its competition for employment amongst the propertiless proletariat, is the floating mass of workmen rejected for the time by the labour-market; this mass of unemployed has a continuous tendency to increase as machinery and the organisation of the factory grow toward perfection, the complement to this phenomenon being the cycles of inflation and depression, which are also a necessary consequence of the great machine industry, and the worldmarket which it feeds. At every fresh depression this matter of the unemployed becomes more pressing and 273 harder to be dealt with, and although the regular recurrence of these crises was denied for a long time, it has now been generally admitted. The periods of depression, which were at first short and sharp, and separated by long times of prosperity, have grown to be of longer duration if comparatively not so severe. As a consequence, the lack of employment over large sections of the population is becoming chronic. It is thought by some of those who further the legal eight hours’ day that this measure would do much towards absorbing the mass of the unemployed; but though its immediate effect might be felt in this direction, yet when the labour-market steadied after the change, it would be found that the evil was little lessened. The chronic lack of employment will have to be dealt with by more direct methods, which will more definitely attack the Freedom of Contract (so-called), of which more hereafter.