542 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
from leisure were unaffected, which it would not be, because the satisfaction 
derived from leisure must rise when each hour of leisure is enriched by 
greater possessions. As regards the effect of education, it is sufficient to 
point out that the value of leisure is a function of appreciative power and 
that this is developed by education, but it must be observed that the higher 
appreciative power might enhance the satisfaction got out of the work 
itself, and that this effect might conceivably counteract the effect on the 
value of leisure, or even more than counteract it. Ambitions would be 
further awakened ; but the ambitious operative would probably demand, as 
a rule, more time for study. I think it unquestionable that, on the whole, 
educational advance causes a curtailment of hours. ‘ But unfortunately 
human nature improves slowly, and in nothing more slowly than in the 
hard task of learning to use leisure well. In every age, in every nation, 
and in every rank of society, those who have known how to work well have 
been far more numerous than those who have known how to use leisure 
well. But on the other hand it is only through freedom to use leisure as 
they will that people can learn to use leisure well: and no class of manual 
workers who are devoid of leisure can have much self-respect and become 
full citizens. Some time free from the fatigue of work that tires without 
educating is a necessary condition of a high standard of life.’* Social 
progress, broadly regarded, by complicating life and rendering vague feel- 
ings of social obligation definite and more insistent, creates new claims on 
leisure. ‘Generally it can be said that the more complex the social organ- 
ism becomes, the more its constituent individuals must devote time, apart 
from work and business, to the family and recreation, to education and 
general affairs, the more necessary is a general social arrangement concern- 
ing the distribution of time between the several purposes which it has to 
serve.’ ? 
The eight hours day has come to be regarded by some social reformers 
as the ideal of the future. The doctrine that the workman should normally 
work eight hours a day has been put forward as holding at least as 
generally and with as high a degree of certainty as, say, the doctrine that 
the workman should normally sleep some definite number of hours a day. 
But I should argue that the problem of the length of the working day is of 
an order different from that of the problem of the time which should be 
devoted to sleep, for whereas the hours which should be given to sleep depend 
mainly upon physiological conditions, though these physiological conditions 
are affected by economic and psychological conditions, the hours which it 
is wise to assign to labour depend upon the attitude of the workman to 
leisure and work, which results as much from non-physiological as from 
physiological influences. It is my purpose to demonstrate that the non- 
physiological value of leisure, as well as its physiological value, must rise 
with progress, and, therefore, that in all probability the hours which should 
normally be worked per day will become steadily less. The ideal working 
day of the future cannot be eight hours, for it must be essentially a pro- 
gressive ideal. As a community advances agitation for shorter hours 
will be constantly breaking out anew. If this be a correct reading of 
progress, it is important that we should understand fully the forces at 
work at each re-settlement of the length of the working day, those on 
the employing side as well as those expressed in the claims of the opera- 
tives. I propose now, in consequence, to disentangle the impulses and their 
relations, into which the question of the determination of the working day 
at any one time may be resolved. 
The problem being elaborate, it is essential that we should proceed by 
successive steps of abstraction. We need not be afraid in this age of under- 
1 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 5th ed., pp. 719-20. 
* Schmoller, Grundriss der allgemeinen Volkswirthschaftslehre, p. 741, 
