distinction
between the Sunday and any other day. Now, Sir, our opponents, if they
are consistent with themselves, must hold that such a law would have
immensely increased the wealth of the country and the remuneration of
the working man. What an effect, if their principles be sound, must have
been produced by the addition of one sixth to the time of labour! What
an increase of production! What a rise of wages! How utterly unable must
the foreign artisan, who still had his days of festivity and of repose,
have found himself to maintain a competition with a people whose shops
were open, whose markets were crowded, whose spades and axes, and
planes, and hods, and anvils, and looms were at work from morning till
night on three hundred and sixty-five days a year! The Sundays of three
hundred years make up fifty years of our working days. We know what the
industry of fifty years can do. We know what marvels the industry of
the last fifty years has wrought. The arguments of my honourable friend
irresistibly lead us to this conclusion, that if, during the last three
centuries, the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest, we should
have been a far richer, a far more highly civilised people than we
now are, and that the labouring classes especially would have been far
better off than at present. But does he, does any Member of the House,
seriously believe that this would have been the case? For my own part,
I have not the smallest doubt that, if we and our ancestors had, during
the last three centuries, worked just as hard on the Sunday as on the
week days, we should have been at this moment a poorer people and a less
civilised people than we are; that there would have been less production
than there has been, that the wages of the labourer would have been
lower than they are, and that some other nation would have been now
making cotton stuffs and woollen stuffs and cutlery for the whole world.

Of course, Sir, I do not mean to say that a man will not produce more in
a week by working seven days than by working six days. But I very much
doubt whether, at the end of a year, he will generally have produced
more by working seven days a week than by working six days a week; and
I firmly believe that, at the end of twenty years, he will have produced
much less by working seven days a week than by working six days a week.
In the same manner I do not deny that a factory child will produce more,
in a single day, by working twelve h