, but they are so obvious that they have not been dwelt
upon as much as they might have been. The reasons are social reasons.
We believe that the well-being of the mining population, numbering
some 900,000 persons, will be sensibly advanced in respect of health,
industrial efficiency, habits of temperance, education, culture, and
the general standard of life. We have seen that in the past the
shortening of hours has produced beneficial effects in these respects,
and we notice that in those parts of the country where the hours of
coal-mining are shortest, the University Extension lecturers find that
the miners take an intelligent interest in their lectures--and it is
among the miners of Fifeshire that a considerable development in
gardening and also of saving to enable them to own their own houses,
has followed on a longer period of leisure.

But the general march of industrial democracy is not towards
inadequate hours of work, but towards sufficient hours of leisure.
That is the movement among the working people all over the country.
They are not content that their lives should remain mere alternations
between bed and the factory. They demand time to look about them, time
to see their homes by daylight, to see their children, time to think
and read and cultivate their gardens--time, in short, to live. That is
very strange, perhaps, but that is the request they have made and are
making with increasing force and reason as years pass by.

No one is to be pitied for having to work hard, for nature has
contrived a special reward for the man who works hard. It gives him an
extra relish, which enables him to gather in a brief space from simple
pleasures a satisfaction in search of which the social idler wanders
vainly through the twenty-four hours. But this reward, so precious in
itself, is snatched away from the man who has won it, if the hours of
his labour are too long or the conditions of his labour too severe to
leave any time for him to enjoy what he has won.

Professor Marshall, in his "Principles of Economics," says:

"The influence which the standard of hours of work exerts on economic
activities is partially obscured by the fact that the earnings of a
human being are commonly counted gross; no special reckoning being
made for his wear-and-tear, of which he is himself rather careless.
Further, very little account is taken of the evil effects of the
overwork of men on the well-being of the next generation.... When t