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been predicted to help us while away free evenings. Doubtless the dispersion of the ballet after the fall of St. Petersburg has had something to do with the revival of dancing, as the dispersion of scholars after the fall of Constantinople had something to do with the Revival of Learning; though just now our own Charleston bids fair to outrival the influence of the old Russian capital. Which brings us to a subject generally avoided outside "highbrow" groups-Education. At the school age when this is the business of existence, most people form such a prejudice against it, or say they do, that it is the last resource in the world you would expect them to return to in later life to help close the gaps between set tasks. Nevertheless they choose, great numbers of them, to do so, and they make their choice heard. Poor universities that already have their hands full with the upbringing of youth are compelled to take on the added effort of extension courses, both summer and winter, for their elders. Charitable organizations are forced to turn aside from charity to teach subjects for which they were never founded and for which they are but ill equipped. And governments are being made to divert energies and funds to found museums of every conceivable sort-science, crafts, history, archæology. People will even pay for these diverse educational privileges, and if they cannot obtain them at close range, they will go in for them at a distance, by "correspondence," or radio. With working time still on the decline, there is no reason to think that there will be any less of this demand in the future.

The problem is to find sufficient personnel to meet it.

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Just as charitable institutions have been driven into education, so immense pressure has been exerted upon them, since the establishment of the sixteen-hour day, to enter many other new and difficult fields of social work. They are being asked, it appears, less and less to relieve poverty and more and more relieve relieve idleness. The people whom they aim to serve not only want classes in many subjects, but they also want facilities for every conceivable sort of diversion. This evolution in our "charities," among which should be counted the farreaching activities of the institutionalized church (and what church now confines its work to its tabernacle?), is one of the most striking features of the age. It is a phenomenon of the new leisure.

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So far we have been considering the victims of the sixteen-hour day. When we turn from the average workers to the preferred classes, there is a still longer hiatus between tasks, lasting anywhere from seventeen to twenty hours. With these groups we should expect to find the leisure problem worse. Paradoxically it is often not so bad as when the hours off duty are fewer. This is due in part to certain modifying psychological factors, and in part to special circumstances. Certain varieties of activity which occupy less than the conventional working time-such as plumbing and bricklaying-seem especially to attract men of naturally contemplative temperament who are unruffled by the stagnation of time inside or outside

of work hours. Then there is the type of person whose illusion of activity varies inversely with the amount he indulges in. One hardly ever hears the worker with the longest schedule complain that he is "driven to death" or that she has "a thousand things to do." These are the words of the twenty-hour-day man, or the woman who has no required hours of labor at all. Such people suffer very little from the heaviness of leisure because they are not aware of having any. Of course, if the working time of one's vocation is phenomenally short, one can always seek a second vocation, and thus hope substantially to cut down even a twenty-hour schedule. Here is a further positive suggestion toward the future solution of the modern problem of leisure: the undertaking_by every worker of several jobs. But would there in that event be enough jobs to go round? They are not too easy to find with our present more modest scheme. And over how many could an individual advantageously spread himself?

It is often remarked that if you want to get a certain thing done (usually it is a thing of no great importance), you will be most likely to succeed if you ask a busy rather than a disengaged person to do it. There is truth in this saying, though hardly for the reason popularly assigned. It is not so much because the busy individual is more efficient that he can be thus prevailed upon to add to his tasks as because he has a poorer perspective. He fails to see that the new task set before him is really not worth while, whereas the more philosophic idler

grasps at once its futility. From this there might seem to be danger of deduction that with the growth of leisure we should all become doubtful in the end of the virtue of undertaking any job whatever. This is possible up to a certain stage; but then a reductio ad absurdum would be reached which would send us back to work again.

A case in point is the break-up of the Victorian "leisure class," which used to be much talked about. It is fast disappearing, if it has not, like the old Russian aristocracy, already gone. Bored by inactivity, its descendants have, for the most part, supplied themselves with jobs. Leisure now seems to be seeking a level. Along with the decline of the old working-day, there have risen certain new types of non-remunerative voluntary labor. Indeed the short schedules of the masses have furnished the unemployed rich with plenty of opportunities for selfrespecting work. For example there has been an enormous growth in the purely recreative side of the work of charitable organizations, that have been forced to provide amusement for laborers in their expanding free time. time. To keep them manned and supplied with funds gives an outlet. to a vast store of energy. An ambitious woman with an interest in such "causes" may now if she cares to do so fill her days as full of board meetings as a bank president.

So too with many other forms of communal effort, nearly all of them novel. Semi-charitable objects such as schools and colleges can assure their graduates lifelong careers in fund-raising. The recent opening of politics to women does not seem

to have entailed a corresponding withdrawal of men, as might have been forecast; on the contrary, it is more likely to cause a doubling of the effort involved. Again, the innumerable women's associations and men's orders (some of them national or international in scope)-all phenomena of the new division of leisure -have multiplied by large figures the total of informal jobs. Thus the barrier between the former the former "leisure" and "labor" groups seems to be vanishing.

Curiously enough, a leveling process appears to be going on in the enjoyment of leisure as well as in its allotment. Without much distinction of class, people seeking diversion read books and magazines, ride about the earth in automobiles, and listen in on electrical waves. The moving pictures attract all social types and all ages. And the night life of cities, which has, as might have been expected, developed tremendously with the extension of the sixteen-hour day, tends more and more-perhaps under the influence of jazz and bootlegging-to become stabilized on a broad social basis. Nowhere, however, has the tendency to democratize the diversions of leisure been more marked than in sports. Formerly sportsmanship was chiefly a matter of caste, and being a good sport was synonymous with being a "gentleman." For For sports cost time even more than money, and the old army of steady workers lacked both. As the equalitarian economic process has gone on by which the "gentleman" has come to have less time and money and the "laborer" more, it was natural that the classes previously excluded from

these forms of amusement should have turned to them as a means of writing off part of their accumulating surplus. The major popular sports-swimming and skating, football and baseball, cricket and golf and tennis-have all received new accessions as a result of the extension of leisure.

Yet although there has been a substantial influx from the "lower" and "middle" classes into the group that goes in for sports at first-hand, its total is still small in comparison with the whole population. Whether this is due to lack of facilities, to slowness of adaptation to change, or to a psychological complex-a feeling on the part of the great realistic majority that sports are in some sense childish affairs, a playing at life in which full-grown men appear rather foolish-it is not possible to determine. However this may be, it is clear that the bulk of modern mankind, even with ample time and money at its disposal, prefers to take its sports vicariously and so comparatively economically. Entire cityfuls delight in beguiling an occasional Saturday afternoon or an evening off in witnessing a football match or prize-fight for one citizen who cares to devote months to the training which might fit him to participate. participate. Large numbers are willing to spend odd moments in reading of the exploits of a Lenglen or a Nurmi, but few desire to go further toward emulating them. Thus the net results in time expended are much smaller than might have been looked for. Sports have become a democratic but a limited resource to be reckoned with in the reduction of the sixteen-hour day.

Only one section of society appears to have no leisure problem, and that is the children. As the number of offspring in many classes has decreased, the parents' margin of leisure has widened. Not so the children's. What with the elaboration of education and the organization of amusements, the modern child has scarcely a moment that he can call his own. While a great to-do has been made over the curtailment of the working-day of adults, little notice has been taken of the mounting hours of their juniors. In special cases-as, for example, the not very large proportion of children who are employed in factories certain protective laws have been passed. Something should now be done about the schedules of the poor little rich folk and the moderately well off, who go to school all winter and to "camp" all summer, and carry, besides, two or three kinds of dancing and rhythmics, art crafts and home crafts, music, scout work, and half a dozen sports. If these conditions are not soon alleviated, the children may take matters into their own hands and form unions to revolt against their intolerable hours.

In every other section of society, the menace of leisure raises its head. And as organization and mechanical invention show no signs of abatement, it will probably grow more rather than less serious until the sixteen-hour day is left far behind.

One of the anomalies of the present situation is, as was said at the outset, that virtually no one except for an occasional philosopher-ad

mits the existence of this problem. The working-man never speaks and apparently never thinks of his sixteen-hour day; his talk is still all in terms of his old wage-earning period. Professional men, and other types of laborers with declining schedules, continue to assure the world that they have less and less "time"whatever they may mean by that.

Now, this is all very interesting psychologically, however reprehensible it may be from the point of view of an accurate statement of facts. It is possible that this general denial of leisure is due primarily to the slowness of human adjustment. After a new idea is announced to the public by scientist or artist, a decent interval is always allowed to elapse before it is hospitably received. Perhaps we have not yet had time to become conscious enough of the new employment situation to express it in the new terms. Or possibly the failure to speak of the current sixteen-hour day is simply a sign of the common unwillingness of mankind to name any uncomfortable reality. Often denial of distasteful fact is a venial sin. But it becomes another matter when it prevents men from taking measures essential for their welfare.

From the brief inventory that has just been given, it is clear that our resources for the advantageous use of our present extra-job hours are anything but adequate not to speak of the still longer hours with which such modern Napoleons as Henry Ford threaten us. If we are to solve our problem of leisure, it is high time that we set about facing it.

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TWO UNFOUGHT BATTLES

A True Secret Service Story of the War

THOMAS M. JOHNSON

s IT true, general, that a staffofficer lost a copy of the attack order?"

"Nothing so crude," the general chuckled. "He wrote to General Pershing describing preparations for the attack, and saying everything was ready for General Pershing to set the date. He used a fresh sheet of carbon-paper, then dropped it into the waste-basket. For five minutes he left his room. When he came back, the carbon-paper was gone—as he had hoped it would be. The German spies were on the job." They surely were on the job and completely fooled-and thanks to them, so were the German General Staff and its two presiding geniuses, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorff.

Thus it happened that during the crucial last months of the war, when the German Army needed every soldier and every gun to stave off defeat, its commanders were haunted by the specter of great American attacks, first in Alsace, then in Lorraine. They moved thousands of troops and many guns from points where they really were desperately needed, to reinforce other points that the Americans made them believe were threatened. The same fear influenced Ludendorff to advise the

German government to seek an armistice. Yet these particular great American attacks never came off.

It was never intended that they should, for they were a colossal practical joke, a Yankee bluff that worked.

Making it work was one of the cleverest "under-cover" jobs of the war. The full facts have been buried in the innermost recesses of the Intelligence Section of the Army General Staff, and until now this true American secret service story has never been fully told. Even now, inquiries bring a chorus of "Don't quote me," so that the story had to be ushered in by an anonymous "general.'

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To begin with, only five men knew all about it, and all of them were generals. There were Pershing and Pétain, American and French commanders-in-chief; McAndrew, then chief of staff of the A.E.F., dead; Fox Conner, then chief of operations of the A.E.F., now deputy chief of staff of the army; and Hugh A. Drum, then chief of staff of the First Army. Later a few others were let into the secret and participated in its execution, but never many. Among them were Colonel Willey Howell and Captain Sanford Griffith of the First Army Intelli

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