At the members' meeting on September 20 a committee was appointed to
prepare an Eight Hours Bill for introduction into Parliament, and in
November this was published as Tract No. 9. It consists of a Bill for
Parliament, drawn up in proper form, with explanatory notes. It provided
that eight hours should be the maximum working day for Government
servants, for railway men, and for miners, and that other trades should
be brought in when a Secretary of State was satisfied that a majority of
the workers desired it. The tract had a large sale--20,000 had been
printed in six months--and it was specially useful because, in fact, it
showed the inherent difficulty of any scheme for universal limitation of
the hours of labour.
The Eight Hours Day agitation attained larger proportions than any other
working-class agitation in England since the middle of the nineteenth
century. For a number of years it was the subject of great annual
demonstrations in Hyde Park. It commended itself both to the practical
trade unionists, who had always aimed at a reduction in the hours of
labour, and to the theoretical socialists, who held that the exploiter's
profits came from the final hours of the day's work. The Fabian plan of
"Trade Option" was regarded as too moderate, and demands were made for a
"Trade Exemption" Bill, that is, a Bill enacting a universal Eight Hours
Day, with power to any trade to vote its own exclusion.
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