540 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
We naturally inquire at the outset why the question of leisure does not 
assume prominence until modern industrialism has supplanted a simpler 
economy, and why much less is heard of it among agricultural than among 
industrial communities? In the hand industries of the past the hours of 
labour were excessively long in comparison with modern industrial standards, 
and among the peasantry and pioneering farmers work never wholly 
ceases in waking hours throughout much of the year except for short breaks 
for meals; and yet little complaint would seem to have reached us from 
either source. The explanation may lie partially in the fact that new 
grievances emerge with the spread of the wages system—the problem of the 
working day does not present itself in quite the same light to wage-earners 
and to the self-employed—that these grievances are rendered more articulate 
by group production ; and that the aggregation of people of one economic 
class in dense packs gives unanimity and volume to the demand for reform. 
The hardships suffered by a scattered population, occasioning discontents, 
which, however, stop short of provoking outbreak, seldom succeed in attract- 
ing public notice ; and people acting in isolation are naturally timid. But 
this, I think, is not the sole explanation. The character of much of the 
world’s work has changed, and so have the demands made upon leisure. 
Industrial work on the whole has certainly become more regular 
and continuous throughout the year, and analysis would seem to 
show that work per unit of time gets more severe, in a sense, as 
communities advance, though no doubt a strong case could be made out 
for the view that the trend of economic progress is towards an end in which 
the character of labour generally will be far more conducive both to satis- 
faction and to human development. I am not so optimistic as to suppose 
that mechanical improvements do not frequently bring with them a new 
monotony of work, though higher wages may prevent them from forcing 
greater monotony of life upon those who suffer from the new monotony of 
work, Mechanical improvement proceeds by ‘specialising out’ mechanical 
tasks, the performance of which by hand must be a dreary occupation, but 
each step in the march of invention seems to create, as a rule, by its incom- 
pleteness, tasks meaning a new and more concentrated monotony, though 
no doubt it must generally result in an appreciable reduction of the amount 
of dull employment involved in the attainment of a given output. Any 
work must be wearisome the pace of which is set by a machine and kept 
absolutely steady. We may usefully compare mechanical improvements 
with discoveries relating to the utilisation of by-products. The latter 
always recover from refuse something of value to the community, but they 
generally leave a refuse more concentrated than that with which they began. 
The road of economic advance is by way of specialism, and just as 
there has been specialism in tools and in division of labour, so there has 
been a specialism of labour in working hours and of leisure and social 
intercourse in non-working hours. Specialism on the one side implies the 
elimination of waste, whether of means or of time, and it has therefore 
meant to the labourer the partial or occasionally complete elimination of 
the leisure with which his working hours used to be plentifully interspersed. 
In a modern workshop, noise, the necessity of discipline, or a continuously 
absorbed state of the attention, have frequently reduced the possibilities of 
conversation to the barest limits. Humanity has no doubt been relieved of 
the heaviest burden of toil by inventions relating to the mechanism of 
production, but their application has been accompanied on the whole by the 
closer concentration of some kind of effort in time. The intensification of 
labour in a more confined sphere of activity may, as Professor Miinsterberg 
argues, exercise more fully the higher human faculties and thereby bring 
with it a deeper interest, but it will almost certainly prove more exhausting, 
even apart from the elimination of change, leisure, and social intercourse. 
And decade by decade, with the ‘speeding up’ of machinery, we should 
