Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/262

250 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 efficiency 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 of 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 opportunities 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 consequences 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 making 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 considerable degree neutralized the gains to themselves to be derived from the use of machinery, and thus have allowed the machines