Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/827

NOTES AND MEMORANDA 80.5 of Indian labour. 'The long hours,' he said, 'are not really hours of work. The Indian workman had half an hour's grace both in coming and leaving. When he arrived he would take his shave and his shampoo in the mill. He also went in and out at will, and cer- tainly from 15 to 20 per cent. of his time was spent in the factory compound.' He liked to take his time over his work; he had not the Englishman's energy, and ' to impose English methods on India was to go against the laws of nature for the sake of factory legis- lation.' Dr. Bahadhurji was followed by Dr. Henry Cook, a former Principal of the same College, who, ?vhile admitting there might be abuses in some of the small mills, pressed the same general view that short-hour legislation was unsuitable to India, because the Indian native was 'naturally dilatory,' and would only work as he chose. Then 'an Indian mill manager' described the system in the Times with more detail, and stated that no factory hand was at work more than three-fourths of the time he was nominally present in the factory; and these or other witnesses tell us how the hands take a whole day off when they want by merely sending in a substitute, and how the mill keeps a regular supernumerary staff to supply the places of those absent from sickness or pleasure. Now all these characteristics, down even to the system of super- numeraries, instead of being any way peculiar to India, are familiar accompaniments of long-hour labour in most countries, and have invariably been mitigated by short-hour legislation; so that their preva- lence, which is so confidently appealed to as a conclusive argument against restricting the hours of labour, is the very best reason for believing the restriction to be perfectly void of harm. All men are 'naturally dilatory'; it is as natural in Europe as in Asia for labour to be less continuous the more it is prolonged, and if the Indian has less physical energy than the Englishman, there would really be more reason, and not less, for shortening his period of application. We have no evidence of the actual effect of a reduction of hours on Indian production, but the Indian workpeople, at all events, who must have a good idea what they are able to do, have been very unanimous in stating their belief to the recent Commission of 1890 that they would do every whit as much work in eleven hours as they do now in their twelve, or thirteen; and the Bombay cotton operatives state in their petition that ' the loss to mill-owners from over-taxing the energies of their servants by the unnatural system of incessant work for nearly thirteen to fourteen hours a day is far greater than they are aware of.' The mill-owners of Ahmedabad threaten, however, that when the Act comes into force t,hey will no longer employ women at the machinery, because ?nen s wages are not much higher and men can work as long as they like, and it was solely on account of this threat that the Factories Commission recommended the exclusion of that particular class of female hands from the operation of the eleven-hour