HE eight-hour day has changed in

THE

popular estimation from a utopian. dream to a disconcerting reality. Yet the Adamson bill is only an incident in the long history of the eight-hour movement. A hundred years ago a good day's work was often eighteen hours long. The gradual shortening has proceeded so quietly that it has attracted little attention. The eight-hour day has been accepted by some employers for twenty-five years. Thousands of men and women are now working on that basis. The change has come through legal process, through strikes, and through voluntary action by employers.

All national employees, like censustakers, postmen, and departmental clerks, are limited by law to an eight-hour day. So also are factory inspectors, road-makers, and other employees of twenty-seven States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico. All work done in private businesses for the National Government, for the state governments of twenty-six States, and for the three dependencies, whether it is building dreadnoughts or hauling granite or sewing mail-sacks, comes into this limitation.

Dangerous trades are more or less limited. Miners may work only eight hours in thirteen States and in Alaska. Employees in smelters and reduction works fall into the same class in eight States and Alaska. Electric-light and power plants, coke-ovens, blast-furnaces, plaster and cement mills, plate-glass works, rollingmills, tunnels, air-pressure and irrigation plants must be conducted on the same basis in certain of the States. Most interesting in the present railway controversy is the fact that railroad telegraph and telephone operators, despatchers, and signalmen, upon whose condition the safety of the public obviously depends, are under an eight-hour law in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Private businesses employ more men and women on the eight-hour basis than do the governments. The bulletins of the United States Bureau of Labor show, during the last twenty-five years of increasing production, a growing number of employees, rising wages, and falling hours of labor. The tail of the day has been sliced off in hunks during the last two years. Munition factories in wholesale numbers have conceded the eight-hour shift. Neighboring factories succumbed. One hundred and twenty-eight concerns, reported by the International Association of Machinists, resolved to blow their whistles at the end of eight hours, thus sacrificing in most cases seven hours a week. This report covers only the last five months of 1915. The products of the factories ranged from cartridges to candy, and included tools, corsets, automobiles, playing-cards, electrical goods, copper, brass, silver, bronze, and lead goods, printing-presses, different kinds of machinery, all sorts of motors, and every variety of ammunition.

These converts of the last year are too recent to register actual results. Those who give their impressions in the matter vary from forebodings that efficiency will vanish, costs pile up, and workmen regret the change, to prophecies of an industrial millennium. The midway statements are of a temporary drop in output, gradually returning to normal.

Accurate information, covering a long period and based on time-cards and payrolls, has been obtained from England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australasia, New Zealand, and Belgium. All this is gathered together in "The Case for the Shorter Working Day," a brief prepared by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark, publication secretary of the National Consumers' League. This thousand-page brief was written before Mr. Brandeis was elected to the Supreme. Court, and was presented to that body to

uphold the legality of the Oregon law limiting the length of a day's work. With this collected testimony before us, the affair moves out of the realm of speculation into the actual business world. American employers want to know about the effect of the eight-hour day upon output. Workmen inquire if it lowers wages. The general public is nervous concerning the cost of living. The experience of a hundred years answers them.

The employers' expectation of lessened production under shortened hours is logical. In childhood we all learned in the old arithmetic:

"If a man can dig 3 feet of ditch in I hour, in 8 hours he can dig 8 x 3 feet, or 24 feet. In 10 hours, 30 feet."

If this reasoning were as true in the factory as it is between the covers of a book, the shortening of the hours from ten to eight would mean a loss of one fifth the output. Fortunately, it is not

true.

When you have a flesh-and-blood man with a spade in his hand, you find that he digs less than three feet the first hour, while the second hour he digs more than three feet. He is at his maximum the second hour. From then on he digs at a slowly diminishing rate until, if you keep him at it long enough, he can dig nothing at all.

The familiar building-a-stone-wall problem and the running-hare-and-hound problem contain the same fallacy. The stone wall advances more and more slowly as the day draws near its close. The real hare sometimes drops dead at the moment when, according to mathematics, she is showing a pair of clean heels to the hounds. The old arithmetic never included the toxin of fatigue in its reckoning.

A tired man is a poisoned man. He has poisoned his brain, he has poisoned his muscles, he has poisoned his nerves and glands. This poison is a toxin which during over-exertion is manufactured in too great quantities to be carried off in the natural manner. To work till one is tired and rest till one is refreshed is the way

of life. But when a man manufactures more fatigue poison in his body during his working period than he can eliminate during his rest period, he has reduced his efficiency.

Mosso, the great Italian physiologist, showed the presence of this toxin by an enlightening experiment with two dogs. One he left sleeping at home. The other he tired out by a long run. Then he anesthetized both and transferred the blood of each to the veins of the other. When they awoke, the jaunting dog was as fresh as a daisy while the home-keeping dog was almost too tired to yawn. Another scientist fatigued a frog's hind leg with a series of tiny shocks till it was too weary to kick. He removed the toxin by running a saline solution through the veins, and the leg was ready to start in kicking again. Hundreds of laboratory tests have proved the presence of the toxin of fatigue in fatigued bodies.

If it were practicable to inject the blood of a refreshed laborer into the veins of a tired one or wipe out human weariness with a saline solution, a man might work day and night indefinitely. Since this cannot be done, the alternative is to substitute a fresh worker when the tired one's energy flags to the extent of impeding the work. The balance point changes year by year. The twelve-hour day was once considered dangerously radical. To-day most office employees work seven hours.

Lord Shaftesbury initiated the shorterday movement when he put through Parliament the act of 1833, limiting the hours of labor for children in textile mills to twelve a day. When the English public found that the mills did not fail and that the children did not become idle and lawless in their increased leisure, the provisions of the act were extended to include women. Later their day was restricted to ten hours.

Shortening the day for women and children always has had the indirect effect of shortening it for men also. Soon millowners were struggling with the paradox that the less the men worked the more they produced. In the dusty files of the

"John," demanded a bewildered manager of one of his men, "will you tell me how it is that you can do more work in eleven hours than you did in twelve?”

"Why," replied John, "we can lay to in eleven hours a day better than we could in twelve because we get more rest at night and we are in better spirits all the day through, and besides the afternoons are not so long."

Add to the "better spirits" the additional assistance of modern machinery, close supervision, and careful schedules, and one obtains a result that one has to get up before breakfast to believe. Try this, for example:

Feb., 1913, 16,000 men, working 10 hours, produced 16,000 Ford cars.

Feb., 1914, 15,800 men, working 8 hours, produced 26,000 Ford cars.

Put in the old arithmetic form this reads:

"Where a man working 10 hours a day produced 1 car a month, a man working 8 hours a day produced 11⁄2 cars a month. Proved by the time-books of an automobile company in the West."

Consider, too, the output of the bituminous coal-mines before and after the miners won the eight-hour day in 1896 and 1897.

Average output, per man, per day, in short tons Year Ohio Penn. Ill. Utah 1895 3.08 3.43 2.63 3.47 1900 3.19 3.56 3.11 3.54

The output varied from year to year, but showed a steady tendency to increase. A part of the gain was due to the further introduction of machine mining, although in Illinois the proportion mined by machinery altered hardly at all. In Utah the change was from twelve hours to eight, yet the business more than held its own.

The same story of increased production with decreased hours is told by The Engis Chemical Works, Belgium, after twelve years' experience; The Salford Iron Works,

pany, United States; The Solway Process Company, Syracuse, United States; The Zeiss Optical Works, Germany; and other companies.

Now that we have had this preliminary practice in believing the unbelievable, it might be well to tell how Mr. William Allan of the Allan and Company Scotia. Engine Works compelled his lazy workmen to give him an honest day's labor. I thought of his expedient many times during a recent trip to Maine. The employers of small labor there told me that while in the good old days a man worked cheerfully from sun-up to dark, the present generation of workmen were a worthless lot, thinking only of themselves. I heard of a carpenter who sorted six nails for six minutes by the watch, a glazier who rolled a ball of putty in his palms the entire length of a tariff discussion, and a plumber who charged up to the householder whose cook he married all the hours of his courtship. The employers of the nail-sorter and the putty-roller and the lover were not soothed by my suggestion that it is physically impossible for a man to idle as much in eight hours as he could in nine.

Now this is what Mr. Allan did. His factory day began, in accordance with a passing English custom, at six in the morning. The men worked till eight-thirty and then went home for breakfast. That is, they were supposed to work, but really they merely transferred the business of sleeping from their beds to snug nooks behind the engines. They slept turn and turn about. They were incorrigible.

"Thinking over the whole question and the best mode of overcoming these irregularities," says Mr. Allan, "I came to the conclusion that an eight-hour day would be more satisfactory to myself as well as to the men. Men who worked overtime could not be expected to keep regular time. in the morning. Growing lads who went to night classes or places of amusement could not be expected to turn out in the early morning."

So Mr. Allan installed the eight-hour

day, beginning at half-past seven. The

men agreed to give up five per cent. of their wages. This was to be returned to them if the experiment succeeded. It did succeed. No diminution of the output under the new régime occurred. The cost of turning out an engine remained the same. The deducted five per cent. of the wages was restored. Later Mr. Allan advanced their pay another five per cent. When the work performed can be measured by the ton or yard or gross, the superiority of the short-day output is clearly shown. It is more difficult to calculate the value of a driver, a bookkeeper, or a street-car conductor. Railway employees are among those whose accomplishment cannot be weighed or counted. When I was crossing the continent a few years ago, our train was stalled for hours in the desert. The engineer had been running his engine a shockingly long time, and he refused to go farther until he had slept. He said that it was not safe for a man half dead with sleep to be responsible for the lives of hundreds of passengers. We waited there in the desert till another engineer could be brought to us. The entire "plant" stood idle because of bad management. The wages of conductors, porters, and brakemen went right on while the train stood still. The road would have saved money by employing more engineers.

You will notice, if you are interested, that engineers who have accidents have often been working overtime. Whether the railroad men aim at the shorter hours they demand or at the overtime pay which will result if schedules are not revised, the public should see to it that it is the shorter hours which they get.

The railway arrangement of hours is more difficult than the factory arrangement, because the factory shifts come and go while the work is stationary. The railroad must drop and pick up its crews at relay stations. But the fundamental principle of scientific management is the same for both. The freight-trains must be speeded and their long delays on sidings cut out, just as in the factories new machines have been invented and econ

omies of time devised. Shortening hours is one way of sharing with the workingman the additional wealth conferred by efficiency engineering.

Many workers oppose shorter hours. Part of this is due to the fear of offending the employer. A woman who had appeared before a state legislature to testify to the overlong hours required in the factory where she worked told me that the very spinners who denied her statements when questioned by the boss would, when they met her alone, say gratefully, "It was a good day's work you did for us that day at the capital."

But most of the opposition comes from fear that shorter days will result in thinner pay-envelops. They, too, were taught by the old arithmetic.

The pay-roll shows a different figuring. The Zeiss Optical Works in Germany changed from nine hours to eight hours. Under the new system, the 233 employees earned eighteen cents an hour in place of fifteen cents. fifteen cents. The difference more than compensated for the deduction of time.

Workmen in other well-managed factories have the same experience. At The Engis Chemical Works in Belgium the founder and managing director, Mr. Fromont, in 1906, after twelve years' experience said:

The workmen were at first opposed to the new system, seeing in the shorter hours a diminished output and consequently lowered wages. Patience and strict discipline were necessary to enforce ample trial. At first they began to realize the benefit to their health and vigor. Almost imperceptibly the daily output increased, and in less than six months from the beginning of the new time-scale the men had succeeded in producing in seven and a half hours of actual work as much as they had formerly turned out in ten.

The loss by the temporary drop in production sometimes has been borne by the employer, sometimes by the workers, and sometimes divided. A well-known talking-machine company, which recently has

and carbons, before any changes had been made. On the way back I told her the story. She had n't put on the sea-shell tint, and the little hollows in her cheeks filled up with color while I talked. When I walked in with her the men grinned with joy and heaved gusty, relieved sighs. We rehearsed all day and most of the night. We have n't told the office a word about the defection of the two vaude-villains. The printing is out, of course, and the old names will stand. She is stiff with fright, and not really physically fit for the strain, but she 's trying heart, soul, mind, and body.

We will work all day, and up to the ultimate moment to-morrow.

JANE.

Three-fifteen A.M., Monday. Sarah, I feel like Guido Reni-remember?-when he stabbed his servant in order to get the right expression of agony for his "Ecce Homo." She fainted in the middle of her big speech an hour ago. I have tucked her in bed, after an alcohol rub and hot milk, and she is to sleep until twelve o'clock. Brother's brother did n't

I don't know how or where to begin. I'll make myself start with the morning. I slipped out without wakening my girl, leaving a note for her. I took the bus to Grant's Tomb, and walked back along the river to Seventy-second Street. It was the most marvelous blue-and-gold morning. Copper-colored leaves crackled crisply under foot, and eiderdown clouds sailed in the sky; I speeded myself into a glow on shady paths, and sat steeping in the sun. I held happy converse with reserved and haughty babies and democratic dogs, but even so I found myself with a panicky margin on my hands. I bethought myself of a never-failing remedy for troublesome thoughts, and went joyously forth like a he-goat on the mountains and bought a