These wages are very much the same as those paid to-day, and the hours then were undoubtedly longer.[74] Nor must it be assumed that wages would have risen more satisfactorily had there been no Factory Acts. Had there been any tendency for wages to rise which the Factory Law was retarding, that tendency would have shown itself in a marked way during the intervals between each Act, but no such thing is observable, as Mr. Wood's figures in the footnote indicate. Moreover, taken all together, the evidence gathered by this investigation proves that neither the demand for improvement nor the organisation to make that demand effective exists in the case of the woman worker. On the other hand, there is no evidence to show that legislation has improved wages, except in so far as it has reduced hours without apparently having lowered rates.
[Footnote 74: _Cf._ "The Course of Women's Wages during the Nineteenth Century," by Mr. G. H. Wood, printed as an Appendix to "A History of Factory Legislation," by B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, where the following figures are given as the estimated average weekly earnings of women and girls in the printing trade: 1840, 6_s._ 3_d._; 1850, 6_s._ 6_d._; 1860, 7_s._ 5_d._; 1866, 7_s._ 10_d._; 1870, 8_s._ 6_d._; 1883, 8_s._ 9_d._; 1886, 8_s._ 9_d._; 1891, 9_s._ 10_d._; 1895, 9_s._ 10_d._; 1900, 10_s._ 1_d._]
On the whole there seems to be no ground for considering that special legislation for women in this trade has materially injured the value of their labour. There is nothing to show that their wages have decreased, that legislation has acted as a drag upon their income, or that they have lost employment to any appreciable extent.
[Sidenote: Want of elasticity in the law.]
A lack of elasticity in the law seems to be the greatest complaint of the employers. On the face of it, it looks like a piece of senseless red-tape that, because it is usually preferable to an employer to open his factory between the hours of 8 to 8, he may not when it is more convenient to him, open it between 6 and 6 or 7.30 and 7.30. It seems absurd that it was an illegal act of an employer to allow two young women to begin work at 6 a.m. and work till 8 p.m., whereas it would have been quite legal if they had begun work at 8 a.m. and worked till 10 p.m., due notice having been given to the Home Office.[75]