250 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The trouble with the eight-hour plan, however, is not here so 

 much as in the fact that so many men who can not get a decent 

 living on eight hours of labor are taught that they can earn as 

 much in that time as in twelve hours, and are made to believe it, 

 or else denounced as scabs and nobodies. If the laborer attempts 

 to work more hours, he is called an enemy of workingmen, an 

 enemy of progress, and so on, until he is forced to a life of partial 

 idleness, while his children are suffering for comforts which his 

 labor could furnish without injury to himself or to any mortal in 

 the world. There are hosts of men somewhat deficient in skill 

 who could partially make up in longer hours their lack of effi- 

 ciency were they permitted to, but as they are not, they are 

 forced to live on the verge of beggary all their days, and are 

 taught to curse society for not giving them a better chance in 

 the world. How many such there are in this country God only 

 knows, but that they are numerous there can be no doubt. The 

 evil is prodigious, and is not confined to this class entirely. Others 

 are affected in an unfavorable way. The idea is encouraged that 

 labor is an evil to be shunned like vice, and that there is a way 

 to enjoy the fruits Qf labor without its exercise. The consequence 

 of the prevalence of this idea is, that men are led to hope for the 

 impossible, to trust in its coming, and to neglect the golden op- 

 portunities for making their way which lie directly before them. 

 The man who thinks he is getting richer by three or four hours 

 of idleness every day is not likely to set much value on time, and 

 when he does not do that, he tends to unthriftiness, and in time 

 will become a good deal of an idler if not a downright loafer. 

 "When the whole community becomes thus affected, the conse- 

 quences will be serious. They are serious already. 



That this is a remarkable age in which we live is the general 

 belief, but of the things that go to make up this belief nothing is 

 stranger than the fact that when all mankind were devoting their 

 best thoughts to the discovery of ways to increase resources and 

 add to the general and individual wealth of society, when schemes 

 of all sorts were being devised to save time in transportation of 

 goods and mails and persons, in planting corn and making hay, 

 in pumping water and feeding cattle, in tanning leather and mak- 

 ing whisky, in mounting flights of stairs and raising broods of 

 chickens — the workingmen as a body should band together and 

 contrive a scheme to compel all hands to throw away absolutely 

 one fourth of their chances to earn and lay up money, and provide 

 for that period sure to come to all who live out the allotted years 

 of man, when leisure will be not merely a luxury but a necessity ; 

 yet this is exactly what they have done. They have in a con- 

 siderable degree neutralized the gains to themselves to be derived 

 from the use of machinery, and thus have allowed the machines 



