As ono Councillor, celebrated for -whafc may bo appropriately termed tbo exaggeration of his straight-shooting, declared, the Bill would bo absolutely perfect if everybody | were to be exempted, from its provisions. But anybody can see, so soon as he has done laughing at the charac teristic sally, that it only means ( that there must bo in every mea sure providing legal sanction to the eight hours principle a very large exemp tion list. At the same time everybody knows that there is a very large propor tion of workers to whom the eight hoars principle is a necessity, and for whom its legislative sanction presents no dilficulty whatever. Surely ail these who now en joy the eight hours principle under the unwritten law are entitled to have their l:i\v reduced to writing. The Council might have got over all the difficulties presented by the Bill if they had simply cut out the exemption list, and substituted a list of all the trades to which the eight hoars principle can be easily applied. Had they done nothing more than simply written the unwritten law, and thereby simply given legislative sanction to the great eight-hour principle, and to its present practical application without any attempt to extend the same, it would have been something. There is no particular reason, moreover, why the application should not be extended. Several trades and callings could bo mentioned off hand which have every right to enjoy the principle, and are not barred by any difficulty whatsoever. These, or some of them, might easily have been added to the list of applications, and the Bill would have been thereby made better. But to throw the Bill out was to run away from difficulty, and to abandon it so quickly savoured somewhat of the process known as scuttling. Some of the later additions to the Council, w© observe, tookadecidod stand againsttheßill; not so much against the eight hours principle as against its extension to what in some quarters is regarded as the extreme of preventing any overtime. A large section workers who are striving hard to get the eight-hours principle in the Old Country—they do not possess it in either the written or the unwritten form are opposed to all overtime employment. 