cotton-mills, and another generation elapsed before it
passed in general use in manufactories and retail shops.[205] Now a
portion of nature's rest has been annexed to the working day. There
are, of course, powerful social forces making for a curtailment of the
working day, and these forces are in many industries powerfully though
indirectly aided by machinery. Perhaps it would be right to say that
machinery develops two antagonistic tendencies as regards the length
of the working day. Its most direct economic influence favours an
extension of the working hours, for machinery untired, wasting power
by idleness, favours continuous work. But when the growing pace and
complexity of highly-organised machinery taxes human energy with
increasing severity, and compresses an increased human effort within a
given time, a certain net advantage in limiting the working day for an
individual begins to emerge, and it becomes increasingly advantageous
to work the machinery for shorter hours, or, where possible, to apply
"shifts" of workers.[206]

But in the present stage of machine-development the economy of the
shorter working day is only obtainable in a few trades and in a few
countries; the general tendency is still in the direction of an
extended working day.[207] The full significance of this is not
confined to the fact that a larger proportion of the worker's time is
consumed in the growing monotony of production. The curtailment of his
time for consumption, and a consequent lessening of the subjective
value of his consumables, must be set off against such increase in
real wages or purchasing power as may have come to him from the
increased productive power of machinery. The value of a shorter
working day consists not merely in the diminution of the burden of
toil it brings, but also in the fact that increased consumption time
enables the workers to get a fuller use of his purchased consumables,
and to enjoy various kinds of "free wealth" from which he was
precluded under a longer working day.[208] So far as machinery has
converted handicraftsmen into machine-tenders, it is extremely
doubtful whether it has lessened the strain upon their energies,
though we should hesitate to give an explicit endorsement to Mill's
somewhat rhetorical verdict. "It is questionable if all the mechanical
inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being."
At any rate we have as yet no security that machinery, owned by
individuals