436 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



out opportunity to save labor by mutual service. Under such 

 conditions life would be hardly wortb living. Every kind of 

 work would be required of every man and woman and there 

 would be no rest. It is by the exchange of services that time is 

 saved, both to the employed as well as to the employer. The man 

 who directs the force of the capital in the possession of which he 

 makes himself rich adds vastly more to the common product from 

 which all wages and profits are derived, than he consumes for his 

 own use from that product in the personal support of himself and 

 his dependents. When just relations are established by free con- 

 tract between rich and poor the service which each renders to the 

 other is an equitable and useful service. Society rests for its very 

 existence upon this interdependence of men and upon the ine- 

 quality in their personal endowments, whether material or imma- 

 terial. The capacity to combine, direct, and use great masses of 

 capital is rare : without this capacity capital becomes inert or it 

 is wasted, while labor becomes less productive the more crowded 

 the area occupied. Hence inequality in possession is the very 

 necessity to the productive application of that which constitutes 

 wealth. The value of a man to the community in which he lives 

 is measured neither by his labor nor by his toil, nor by the num- 

 ber of hours that he works ; it is established by the service that 

 he renders, and that rests finally upon the quality of the mental 

 energy with which he is endowed and upon the effectiveness of 

 the forces, material or immaterial, to which he gives direction. 

 The mind of man is the prime factor in the conversion of forces 

 to the end that there may be abundance and leisure in place of 

 scarcity accompanied by long hours of arduous toil. 



Such being the conditions, it does not follow that every one 

 may not feel a hearty sympathy with any true effort on the part 

 of those who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their own 

 brows, to shorten the hours of labor so as to save more time for 

 rest and recreation. It is only to the false methods by which these 

 ends are sought that exception can be taken. 



When these efforts tend to deprive the very men who seek to 

 be benefited of their own personal liberty, and when their right 

 of free contract is impaired by their own acts, the time has 

 come to discriminate in order to separate the true from the 

 false methods of saving time ; or, in other words, to distinguish 

 between the true and the false methods of shortening the hours 

 of labor. 



It is customary to define three factors which enter of necessity 

 into the production of all material things — land, labor, capital. 

 There are, in fact, two other factors inseparable from production, 

 and each is as essential as the land, the labor, or the capital 

 — namely, the mental power, or, in other words, the mental energy 



