PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 541 
expect to find more nervous strain accompanying the process of production. 
That industrial functioning has become,a severer tax on the energy of the 
workman is fully borne out by the evidence of numerous reports upon 
industrial conditions. 
The increasing nervous strain of industrial work, whether it results from 
the progressive specialisation of labour or not, would account sufficiently 
for the curious circumstance that there is apparently no finality about any 
solution of the ever-recurring problem of the normal working day, though 
it is not the sole explanation. The workman whose day has been reduced is 
soon repeating again his demand for shorter hours, and there are pessi- 
mists who infer from this that the shorter hours attained hitherto have 
shifted the community on to a slippery inclined plane which leads from 
the economic ‘struggle for existence’—by which is meant the competitive 
striving for place, reputation, and achievement, whereby progress is 
naturally stimulated—to economic stagnation. They think they discern in 
the present generation a growing disinclination to make an effort and a 
growing disposition to take the easy path; but that the truth cannot be 
mainly with the pessimists an examination of the effects of curtailments of 
the daily hours of labour upon output would at least suggest. A mass of 
material exists in official and other reports in more than one advanced 
industrial country for a study of this question. Beginning with the writings 
of Robert Owen and Daniel le Grand, both of whom laid especial stress on 
moral and social elements, an investigator would find an almost unbroken 
sequence of evidence. Mr. John Rae collected a volume of facts in 1894, 
and these may now be supplemented by the experiences of yet another 
half-generation.* Limitations of space forbid that I should quote 
examples, but I may at least roughly generalise from the recorded facts. 
I have found no instance in which an abbreviation of hours has resulted 
in a proportionate curtailment of output. There is every reason to suppose 
that the production in the shorter hours has seldom fallen short by any 
very appreciable amount of the production in the longer hours. In some 
cases the product, or the value of the product, has actually been augmented 
after a short interval. In a few cases the reaction of the shorter hours on 
the output per week has been instantaneously noticeable, and the new 
product has surpassed the old product before mechanical methods could be 
improved. Further, for some industries—for instance, for the Lancashire 
cotton industry—we have preserved for us the results of a string of observa- 
tions reaching back about three-quarters of a century, and it would appear 
from them that the beneficial effects wrought upon output by the shortening 
of hours were substantially repeated, though, of course, in different degrees, 
at each successive reduction of the working day. 
So far I have directed your attention mainly to two incidents bearing 
upon the hours of labour: the one, the effect of industrial development in 
curtailing the hours which result in the largest daily output; the other, the 
subjective effect of the increasing strain associated with such advance. I 
have now to add another influence, which is the enhancement of the value of 
leisure which must accompany a rise in wages, improved education, and social 
progress generally. It must be insisted that the amount of the real wage 
yielded by a given money wage varies as the time left to spend it; and, 
further, that the value of leisure is a function of the goods which can be 
enjoyed in the period of leisure. The acute operative would aim at so distri- 
buting his time between work and recreation that the gain resulting from 
a little more leisure would equal the loss consequent upon the implied 
diminution of wages. Hence, when the volume of goods per head annually 
supplied to labour was augmented, an attempt would almost certainly be 
made by the operatives to buy more leisure, even if the satisfaction derived 
1 Note in particular the Report of the Industrial Commission of the United States. 
