Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/454

436 opportunity to save labor by mutual service. Under such conditions life would be hardly worth living. Every kind of work would be required of every man and woman and there would be no rest. It is by the exchange of services that time is saved, both to the employed as well as to the employer. The man who directs the force of the capital in the possession of which he makes himself rich adds vastly more to the common product from which all wages and profits are derived, than he consumes for his own use from that product in the personal support of himself and his dependents. When just relations are established by free contract between rich and poor the service which each renders to the other is an equitable and useful service. Society rests for its very existence upon this interdependence of men and upon the inequality in their personal endowments, whether material or immaterial. The capacity to combine, direct, and use great masses of capital is rare: without this capacity capital becomes inert or it is wasted, while labor becomes less productive the more crowded the area occupied. Hence inequality in possession is the very necessity to the productive application of that which constitutes wealth. The value of a man to the community in which he lives is measured neither by his labor nor by his toil, nor by the number of hours that he works; it is established by the service that he renders, and that rests finally upon the quality of the mental energy with which he is endowed and upon the effectiveness of the forces, material or immaterial, to which he gives direction. The mind of man is the prime factor in the conversion of forces to the end that there may be abundance and leisure in place of scarcity accompanied by long hours of arduous toil.

Such being the conditions, it does not follow that every one may not feel a hearty sympathy with any true effort on the part of those who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their own brows, to shorten the hours of labor so as to save more time for rest and recreation. It is only to the false methods by which these ends are sought that exception can be taken.

When these efforts tend to deprive the very men who seek to be benefited of their own personal liberty, and when their right of free contract is impaired by their own acts, the time has come to discriminate in order to separate the true from the false methods of saving time; or, in other words, to distinguish between the true and the false methods of shortening the hours of labor.

It is customary to define three factors which enter of necessity into the production of all material things—land, labor, capital. There are, in fact, two other factors inseparable from production, and each is as essential as the land, the labor, or the capital—namely, the mental power, or, in other words, the mental energy