r men at the lower rate of wages, and its products
will occupy the market. The popularity of the plan of work making is
the effect of looking for benefits which are transient rather than
permanent. If it were carried in many trades as far as it already is
in some, it would probably neutralize, even for those who resort to
it, much of the benefit of organization, and work still greater injury
to others.[1]

[1] It will be seen that whether the policy is successful in
giving employment to the partially idle or fails to do so
depends on the amount of reduction in the sale of the goods
which the increased cost of making them entails; and if the
market is highly sensitive to increased cost, the policy may
fail in securing even a transient increase of employment.

_The Eight-hour Movement as a Work-making Policy._--The effort to
reduce the hours of labor to eight per day has in it so much that is
altogether beneficent that it is not to be put in the same category
with the ca'-canny plan of working. And yet one leading argument in
favor of this reducing of the number of hours of work is identical
with that by which a reduction of the amount accomplished in an hour
is defended. The purpose is to make work and secure the employment of
more workers. What has been said of the other mode of work making
applies here. Reducing the length of the working day cuts down the
product that workers create and the amount that they get. In the main
the loss of product is probably offset by the gain in rest and
enjoyment; but the loss of product, taken by itself alone, is an evil,
and nothing can make it otherwise. If the hours were further reduced,
the loss would be more apparent and the gain from rest and leisure
would be less.

_One Sound Argument in Favor of the Greater Productivity of the
Eight-hour Day._--There is one reason why the eight-hour day may in a
series of generations prove more permanently productive than a longer
one. It may preserve the laborers' physical vigor and enable them to
keep their employment to a later period in life. The dead line of
sixty might be obliterated.

If what we wanted were to get the utmost we could out of a man in a
single day, we should do it by making him work for twenty-four hours;
after that, for another twenty-four hours, he would be worth very
little. If we expected to make him work for a week, we should probably
shorten the day to eighteen hours. If we expected to em