WORK AND REST: GENIUS AND STUPIDITY. 423 



out a like periodicity. Throughout European history especially there 

 can be traced waves of activity and inactivity traversing every avenue 

 of human thought and expression. For the race, as well as for the 

 individual, the 'magnum opus' is performed in the 'minimum tempus' 

 — a year is often more than a century. 



We have now considered in the life of the animal, the child, the wo- 

 man, the genius, the criminal, the savage, the race, the theory that brief 

 periods of work at the highest possible tension alternating with longer 

 periods of rest or changed activity represent the best working conditions 

 and have found not a little evidence to support it in every quarter. The 

 experience of other than mere professional athletes, the methods of 

 animal trainers, the results of half-time schools, the progressive re- 

 duction of the hours of labor for working-men and shop-employees will 

 furnish many more data of the same kind. It has been argued that 

 two hours physical labor per diem would suffice, were the product 

 economically distributed, to keep the whole world well supplied, so 

 great has been the advance in labor-saving machinery, methods of trans- 

 portation, etc. Is it altogether unreasonable to suppose that two hours 

 intellectual work, under right conditions and with economic distribution 

 of the product, would suffice to keep the whole world supplied here also ? 

 Two hours of every one's best would be something worth achieving, 

 physically and intellectually. An end something like this is the ideal 

 to which things are bound to tend. Some poet of the future may be 

 able to sing: 'Better the New World hour than the long European day.' 

 The racial nervousness of the American people, non-pathological in 

 reality, is perhaps the groundwork for this achievement. 



