this; but you do not
prove it; and all experience proves the contrary. We interfere on the
Sunday to close the shops. We do not interfere with the labour of the
housemaid. But are the housemaids of London more severely worked on the
Sunday than on other days? The fact notoriously is the reverse. For your
legislation keeps the public feeling in a right state, and thus protects
indirectly those whom it cannot protect directly.

Will my honourable friend the Member for Sheffield maintain that the
law which limits the number of working days has been injurious to the
working population? I am certain that he will not. How then can he
expect me to believe that a law which limits the number of working hours
must necessarily be injurious to the working population? Yet he and
those who agree with him seem to wonder at our dulness because we do
not at once admit the truth of the doctrine which they propound on
this subject. They reason thus. We cannot reduce the number of hours of
labour in factories without reducing the amount of production. We cannot
reduce the amount of production without reducing the remuneration of the
labourer. Meanwhile, foreigners, who are at liberty to work till they
drop down dead at their looms, will soon beat us out of all the markets
of the world. Wages will go down fast. The condition of our working
people will be far worse than it is; and our unwise interference will,
like the unwise interference of our ancestors with the dealings of the
corn factor and the money lender, increase the distress of the very
class which we wish to relieve.

Now, Sir, I fully admit that there might be such a limitation of the
hours of labour as would produce the evil consequences with which we are
threatened; and this, no doubt, is a very good reason for legislating
with great caution, for feeling our way, for looking well to all the
details of this bill. But it is certainly not true that every limitation
of the hours of labour must produce these consequences. And I am, I must
say, surprised when I hear men of eminent ability and knowledge lay down
the proposition that a diminution of the time of labour must be followed
by diminution of the wages of labour, as a proposition universally
true, as a proposition capable of being strictly demonstrated, as
a proposition about which there can be no more doubt than about any
theorem in Euclid. Sir, I deny the truth of the proposition; and for
this plain reason. We have already,