THE SHOPS AND OFFICES ACT. "Like a Thief in the Night."

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 229, 19 November 1904, Page 6

THE SHOPS AND OFFICES ACT. "Like a Thief in the Night."

THE atmosphere is sultry with the expletives of the small shopkeeper, who sees rum sbarmg him m the face from the working of the new Shops and Offices Act The small shopkeeper is entitled to his opinion, and if he doesn't get ruined everyone will be very glad, himself included This experimental legislation, for which the country wasn't in the least prepared, was the spasmodic compromise of a dead-tired Parliament, just as it had one foot in. the railway tram and another in the buildings so to speak. The Upper and Lower Houses quarrelled over it, and, after being hacked about most cruelly, it gets to Chicago m the form of a scarecrow. Nobody expected it It hit the colony with a clap like thunder * * * The Bill, being of such widespread importance to every class m the community, should have been about the first business to be done during the session, so that the people whom it affected might have had an opportunity of examining its effects, and pointing out its defects. The indecent haste with which the measure was put through is very discreditable. You will notice that "you cannot buy milk before 8 in the morning, or after six at night Milk is not a necessity You can buy beer before eight, and get as much as you can carry up till ten at night You can't get your hair cut, but then there axe no Chinese barbers These distinctions may be fair and impartial and statesmanlike, but we can't see it * » * The small shopkeeper is sympathising with himself veiy heartily over this new business It will probably be threshed o>ut all over again next session, and much money spent over it In the meantime, the lawyers score. Apart from the exemptions which are unfair, the new law probably won't do> anybody much harm, and when the wild surge of public opinion has died down, the public will look at it in the way they regard the Wednesday closing, which, when first instituted, caused the united hair of the shopkeepers to stand on end It has since been lying perfectly flat * • » Talking about hair, the barbers are m arms. The average man's hair will go on growing, and the average man won't let his wife cut it. He will be compelled to hustle during statutory hours to get his crop harvested People will smoke, even if they cannot buy tobacco after 6 o'clock The necessities of folks

don't become less because shops are closed. On the other hand the new law will stop some forms of illegitimate competition » * • "Interference with the liberty of the subject" is what the average man calls the Act, but it gives a great many subjects liberties they never had before, and which were ioimerly held by trade unionists, who want to knock off at five, and the fellows who serve them in the shops to knock off at 10 or 11 If there is to be any temporary disturbance or hardship, an adjustment will be effected merely by the passage of time and a settling down into the new conditions which arei — except foi those exemptions — alike for eveiybody. * * • The most obvious injustice of the Act is that it includes chemists A man knows when he is going to get a steak, or a chop, or a glass of milk, but he doesn't know when he is going to get measles or typhoid, or a broken leg. A clause in the Act should have stipulated that illnesses were only to occur within statutory hours. The new law will do' a lot of levelling up, but, unless the people settle down into the conviction that it isn't the monster of iniquity it now parades as, there will be a tremendous and expensive talking match over it next session.