230 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
It is not the purpose of this paper to trace the external progress 
of the eight-hour movement. Disregarding the rhetorical exag- 
erations of a public address such as that just quoted, it is 
sufficient to observe that there was an interesting agitation during 
the sixties and the early seventies, which provided nearly all the 
ideas of the later movement. A long interval of quiescence fol- 
lowed the panic of 1873. In the middle eighties the unions again 
took up the question, making an unsuccessful attempt to intro- 
duce the eight-hour day in 1886. A period of vigorous agitation 
followed, culminating in the successful effort of the carpenters 
in 1890. The miners, who were chosen by the Federation as the 
next trade to lead the fight, failed at the last moment, to the dis- 
couragement of the other unions. Then came the great Home- 
stead and Coeur d’Alene strikes of 1892, and attention was 
liverted to other issues, the eight-hour question losing its primacy. 
In the course of years, however, progress was made, and in 1907 
President Gompers reported more than two dozen crafts work- 
ing only eight hours, most of them in the building and printing 
trades and the mines. The International Typographical Union 
had just expended four million dollars in establishing the eight- 
hour day.’ It remained for the events of the war to complete 
the process just sketched, and to usher in the present era, in 
which eight hours may be regarded as the normal workday of 
organized labor. 
It is the ideas underlying the movement, especially in its earlier 
period down to 1892, with which we are concerned. Why did the 
men who were to unify the American labor movement take up 
first the question of hours, and for ten years make the shorter 
workday the central demand in their positive platform? The 
opinion may be hazarded that it is because the theory of the 
eicht-hour day happened to fit particularly well the practical 
needs of their situation, and was therefore a tool well-nigh indis- 
pensable to them in their hard task of organization. The matter 
is not without interest for the student of economic theory, and 
particularly of the productivity theory of wages, inseparably 
connected with the name of Professor Clark. 
For more than forty years, from the establishment of the 
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881 down 
L Proceedings, 1907, p. 32. 
2 Ibid., p. 33.