narrative, which, when it is put between covers, looks like a real live book. To compete with "Ask Me Another" questionnaires and similar exercises, it should take as long to get through them. Perforce the modern poet is not the idle, but the busy, "singer of an empty day."

But fortunately things to be read must first be written. And herein lies another convenient dike against the encroachment of leisure. Writing, once a specialized employment, is now being thrown open to the whole population. As a result of the foreshortening of the workday, authorship has been removed from the jealous grasp of the few—the highly privileged and the professional journalists. There is now, as far as time goes, no reason why a plumber should not set out on a family sagaindeed unless he is unusually resourceful in other types of diversion, there is good reason why he should do so to occupy his long hours off duty. I have seen no statement as to the present hours of yeggmen and tramps, but their recent invasion of literature seems to indicate that they too are "up against" a protracted leisure day. Moreover, to supply the ever rising demand, authors are being recruited from all ages as well as from all ranks. The number of our adolescent writers is growing

apace.

There are some who deplore this democratization, as they call it, of a once exclusive art. They should have thought of this possible result when they advocated the sixteenhour day and desired to have the masses taught to read. No normally aggressive person with time on his hands can look at other people's

works indefinitely without having a healthy curiosity to see how a book of his own would look-at least in typescript. Publishing such experiments is another matter, which we cannot consider here. For the moment the question is less one of literature than of the economics of leisure. Living as we do in a realistic world, we may expect to see the sharpening hunger for printed pages, as a result of lengthening week-end and shrinking workday, somehow supplied.

Then there are the "pictures" (the movies or the cinema according to one's nation or station) to fall back upon. They may well be classed with books, as first aids to the idle, for two reasons. Primarily because most of their directors have failed so far to free them from entangling, and often bungling, alliances with reading-matter in the conventional sense. However eloquently a sequence of pictures may tell its own story, it must not be allowed, say these magnates, to speak directly to the public. (There was "The Last Laugh"; but the laugh in the end will be on the conservatives of Hollywood.) Yet in a more fundamental meaning the moving films are to be regarded as reading; for do they not revive the principle of the earliest kind of calligraphy-the archaic pictographs of very ancient peoples? In our libraries we read characters out of which all drama and universality have been lost. At the cinema we read the running characters of our common mother-tongue.

Obviously we are dependent upon all that we can take in of printed matter in the usual sense, as well as in the older sense of the movies,

for assistance in shouldering our burden of leisure. One sometimes wonders in a crowded picture-show house of immense size what the masses did before they had the three-reel films. One answer is that they didn't have the free time to attend such affairs. A curve or graph representing the expansion of the movie and the printing industries would coincide in a remarkable fashion with the rise of the sixteenhour day. How much further we can develop this resource in the future, is for the oculists to determine, for there is a physical limit to the use that can be made of the eye. Doubtless the psychologists will also have something to say about the number of books or films per diem that can be safely perused, for too much reading, like too little, makes Jack a dull boy.

But even two kinds of writing are not enough to fill all our spare time. Besides, man as he exists in Western civilization, unlike his Oriental brother, cannot always be sitting still, and our workday occupations, as we are frequently reminded, have been growing increasingly sedentary. These facts alone are sufficient to account for the present mania for riding about the world, whether in steamship or train, airplane or motor-car. Happily a good deal of leisure can be disposed of in this form of activity, which for the majority who indulge in it puts very little strain on the higher nervous system. This is notably true if one pushes one's travels into foreign countries and pauses now and again to look at an alp or a cathedral. But motoring without objective, whether in the air or on the earth,

has also developed possibilities as a time-killer. It gives a pleasant illusion of "doing something," especially grateful to the still mobile millions employed at desks or machines, as well as to the old and retired. Like the craze for reading, its vogue is entirely logical.

And what of the future of riding as a resource for the leisure masses? It does not look so bright as it should. The danger seems to lie in the increased speed of locomotion and the consequent threat of a drop in time consumed. At present the transatlantic crossing, which with average luck may be prolonged to eight days, is an ideal way to use up free time. But what is going to happen to that vacation mainstay of hundreds of thousands—a summer trip abroad— when the eight-day sea passage is reduced to twenty-four hours by air? There is, I fear, grave peril of such an evolution within a generation, if not within a decade.

But, the reader will say, there is a more favorable outlook for motoring terrestrial than for motoring celestial as a consumer of leisure. The congestion of vehicles on our popular highways has already, it is argued, acted as a brake on speed, with a corresponding extension in the use of unemployed time; and the general opinion is that the normal increase of traffic should at least prevent any acceleration. But one cannot be sure about that. Men are singularly unimaginative where the facts of their daily life are concerned. May not the inevitable increase in traffic beyond its present well-nigh unmanageable mass force us into a totally new method of handling it; something, perhaps, in the nature of

a viator, or moving surface for crowded roads, on the principle of the escalator, or moving stairway, which would admit both of far greater numbers of motors (since they could stand with safety end to end) and of far greater speed without the danger of collision which accompanies the present rate?

20

The human body is so constructed that it can only do about so much of one thing, no matter what opportunities are offered. As riding, like reading, involves eye-strain, it cannot be indefinitely relied upon for aid in passing the sixteen-hour day. This is where music comes in. It has large potentialities for the reduction of leisure, since it uses another sense. The routine of modern work imposes less tax on the auditory faculty than on the visual. Hence, when it is done for the day, our ears are still fresh. That is why we sometimes find attending a concert in the evening more recreative than reading a book.

And how well provided we are with music to ease the burden of leisure! Generally I think Mozart the perfect after-dinner diversion, but there are moods which nothing short of Beethoven will satisfy, or Bach, or Wagner; there are moments when we want to be ravished by the violent moderns, and other moments when we crave our own sophisticated jazz. But there are, or have been, great physical difficulties in the way of a musical solution of the leisure problem. For all except the few initiates, music to be enjoyed must be heard by the sensual ear, and this introduces the element of instrumental performance. Almost every

one can read Sterne, let us say, and get the gaiety; but only a mere handful of people can play Mozart and get anything but the most dismal results. And although the number of good public interpretations is fortunately growing, they are still beyond the reach of the vast majority.

Not until recently, therefore, has music shown possibilities of coping with anything like its share of the sixteen-hour day. But the mechanisms for reproducing sound are changing all that. Granted that we have had to take them up to the present partly on faith, the ear by their aid seems likely at last to do its bit for the whole man. The radio, like the phonograph and other devices, is bringing music to people who in the past had to do without it. We may hazard a guess that the future amelioration of our leisure conditions depends in no small degree upon the success that science may have in perfecting musical reproduction.

Nor are the other arts-the theater, the dance, painting, sculpturebeing neglected as possible, if not powerful, agencies for reducing the mass of spare time. Indeed steadily has the increase in playhouses and museums (and of the crowds frequenting them) kept pace with the multiplication of nonworking hours that one suspects here a nice mathematical relation between them, if one only knew how to put it; something that could be neatly expressed like Gresham's ubiquitous law or Euclid's delightful fable of the variables. Of late, the liveliest of all the lively arts has done even more than could have

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.

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 to 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.

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. 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