to-morrow. Properly applied,
the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear from
it. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merely
to alter the direction of human effort.

Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours
of labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization.
Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal
towards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. The
world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not
stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works
harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older
want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn
thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is
restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious
discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It
should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of
the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work
and shorten its working day.

And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the
subject of work in relation to human character and development. The
nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady
tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate
the beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of the
day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep
was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest
blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at
the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into
well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the
distracted sleep of princes.

The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it
lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is
too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at
the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too
long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising
here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be
shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a
working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper
development of human capacity and for the rat