this closer application possible without injury to the organism, by allowing the worker more time off for tissue repair between working days, and by eliminating so much of the "passive fatigue" which we have discussed above. Every one has a maximum or optimum of production, when he accomplishes most in the shortest time, and the reduction of hours is followed by increased efficiency up to the point where the greater speed and intensity, automatically acquired, overpasses physiological limits. When the worker's natural adaptation to the shorter day is not sufficient, so that pressure and effort must spur him to accomplish too large a task in too short a time, the benefits of reduced hours are lost. For the excessive intensity of effort costs the worker more than is repaired by the longer space of time allowed off for recuperation.

Just where each man's maximum lies, when he can accomplish most in the shortest time without injury to himself, Abbé thought essentially a matter of special investigation. But he concluded, from his own extended observations and from the experience of others in Germany and England, that for about three-fourths of the industrial workers of Germany nine hours was too long a day in which to reach their maximum and eight hours not too short to reach it. He therefore recommended a program still commonly held radical-the gradual reduction of the workday not to nine but to eight hours for German industries, in the interests of economic development and of greater national efficiency.

Abbé made this recommendation before the era of Germany's greatest industrial successes, before the Germans had, as an expert on industrial efficiency writes, "advanced their industrial condition, which twenty years ago was a jest, to the first place in Europe if not in the world" by realizing "the supreme importance of efficiency as an economic factor." But ten years ago Abbé had a keen eye for Germany's then growing rivalry with British industries, and he foresaw that

Gantt, H. L.: Work, Wages and Profits, page 179. Published by The Engineering Magazine, New York, 1910.

the secret of ultimate success lay in the development of greater national efficiency. Germany's most valuable capital seemed to him the intelligence and initiative of her working people, a buried treasure. And he urged the development of that capital,-the enfranchisement of the capacities of the nation,-by all the resources of science and education. He felt certain that a wiser organization of industry should allow the workers a wider margin of leisure and time for development away from the inevitably deadening monotony of minutely sub-divided labor.

Germany had been spared, he said, the worst consequences of unregulated industrial expansion. The ten-hour agitation in England, preceding and following the bill of 1847, which fixed a normal day for women and children in textile mills and thereby reduced the hours of men in the same mills, kindled a light which had illuminated all Europe (der Widerschein des Lichtes-in England-hat ganz Europa erleuchtet). Abbé himself had seen the reflection of that light in the early 50's. For as a young child, he had seen his father, an old man at thirty-eight, working sixteen hours a day in a Thuringian spinning mill. The British Ten Hours Bill first greeted by employers as the death knell of industry, and as the signal for British capital to migrate to other lands (a fable how often resurrected since that date!) soon showed its true results. German mills, including the one in which Abbé's father worked, soon followed the English precedent and gradually reduced their hours from sixteen to eleven per day.

Thus Abbé knew of his own experience what the shortened day meant to the laborer and his family. He always looked upon industrial problems as a son of the people, as well as an owner and capitalist (mit dem Auge des Arbeitsohnes, dem nicht unter der Hand Unternehmer-und Kapitalistenaugen wachsen wollten).* And his many-sided experience crystallized into a belief that to develop Germany's flesh and blood capital, one of the most important needs was * Abbé, op. cit., p. 4.

to compress work into as few hours as possible without overstrain or impaired efficiency, so as to widen the ranges of leisure and development.

7. THE TREND TOWARD SHORTER HOURS IN THE
UNITED STATES

We have concentrated our attention upon these three examples of reduced hours-English, Belgian and Germanbecause they are specific and are to some degree substantiated by detailed statistics. A host of other less specific examples might be cited from a wide range of industries in which working hours have been successfully shortened without financial disaster. The testimony of employers and manufacturers, showing how efficiency has risen and output flourished when the workday has been reduced to nine and even to eight hours, may be found detailed in various volumes devoted to this topic. These include industries employing men alone, and industries employing women alone, and those which employ both sexes; industries mechanical, textile, and chemical; trades as diverse as mining and the manufacture of jams; shoe making and ship building; hardware, glass, bottle making and cigar making; printing and the structural trades.

We do not here refer at length to Australasia's half century of success with the short workday. In 1856 the eight-hour day was introduced in the Australian building trades by trade union agreements. Since that time the movement has widened and steadily grown, until now it embraces practically all but the manual workers in clothing and other domestic industries. But a small and distant colony is, as regards trade and commerce, in too isolated a position to be of much practical concern in our discussion. The AusSome of the best popular books on this subject are: Webb, Sidney, and Cox, H.: The Eight Hours Day. London, W. Scott, 1891. Hadfield and Gibbons: A Shorter Working Day. London, Methuen and Co, 1892. Rae, John: Eight Hours for Work. London, Macmillan and Co., 1894. Weber, Adna T.: The Eight Hours Movement. In Report of the New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1900.

tralian industries which affect the world market are chiefly agricultural and stock raising. Hence the Australian eighthour day has had little significance in world competition. The experience of Australasia in maintaining a workday shorter than the rest of the world is in itself a chapter of deep interest, but we cannot generalize from these facts as we can from facts and figures of a society more nearly akin to our own. We are, indeed, so largely thrown back upon facts and figures from other countries because our own are the most meager and least satisfactory of any industrial nation. No American studies of output have been published which can compare with the three which we have analyzed above.*

The chief confirmation which our country affords of the point we have been examining in detail,-the effect upon output of the shortened workday,—is the actual movement of industry in the direction of shorter hours, a movement not merely in posse, but for some time past in esse, existent.

We have already pointed out that during the past thirtysix years there has been a continuous, although very slow, movement towards shorter working hours for women, secured through legislation in their behalf. There has been also a slow but certain march towards shorter hours in men's employments, especially where strong organizations of working men deal collectively with their employers through trade agreements. But here we face an extraordinary paradox! For while working men are bargaining for and obtaining the eight-hour day in many of the great trades throughout the country, women and the laws in their behalf limp in the rear, still for the most part aiming at a ten-hour working day. Eight hours for men, ten hours for women and girls,—an ironic commentary on the cast of our society.

*For an interesting reference to a successful American experiment in reducing the workday see The Steel Workers by John A. Fitch, p. 180. (The Pittsburgh Survey. Russell Sage Foundation Publication. New York, Charities Publication Committee, 1911.) In 1904, the Sharon Steel Hoop Co., at Sharon, Pa., reduced the hours of about 150 men engaged in the finishing mills from ten to eight hours. The tonnage turned out is said to have remained the same, and the general opinion in Sharon was in all ways favorable to the shorter day.

In this instance the discrimination against women is particularly paradoxical, because for many years the only effective reduction of men's hours of work came through the laws reducing women's hours. Men who worked in textile mills with women, shared all the benefits of the long tenhour agitation in England and America. They were and are automatically dismissed with the women at the close of the ten-hour day. This automatic though tacit inclusion of the men has been recognized since the beginnings of legislation, and at various times the laws for women were most hotly opposed by those who resented that workingmen were obtaining indirectly, "skulking behind the petticoats," a protection which they could not secure openly for themselves.*

Yet in the great trades which during the past twentyfive years have reduced the workday to nine or to eight hours, such as the cigar makers, the carpenters and builders, the printers, granite cutters and brewers,-few if any women share the benefit.

If the short day were the enemy of production, as its opponents assert, and actually led to a lowered output in the long run, the progress towards an eight-hour day in the great men's trades would long since have broken down. No trade could persist and grow which was permanently carried on at a loss. The trend towards the shortened workday has been retarded by the mistakes of trade unions as well as by the greed of employers; but it is a fact and proceeds today only because, whether recognized or not, it is in harmony with the elemental facts which have emerged from our study; because economic efficiency rises and falls with the worker's physical efficiency, and whatever contributes to the latter tends to raise the former.

The United States Industrial Commission appointed by Congress in 1898, which sat for almost four years hearing evidence from 700 witnesses on capital, labor, agriculture, and immigration, devoted considerable attention in its final • Webb, Sidney, and Cox, H.: The Eight Hours Day, p. 20.