Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/254

248 desired. The invention of labor-saving devices, so-called, the cotton gin, the factory loom, the sewing machine et al. has turned out sociologically to be very different from that, for the time saved from the old methods has been fully occupied in doing more work, raising more cotton, weaving more cloth, making more clothes. Men have not more leisure because they want something else more than they want leisure. Tastier food and personal adornment are the things that bring the chief stress upon life.

Leisure and idleness are not identical. Leisure is the relief from the stress for maintaining life. There is no leisure for one whose whole time is required to supply food, clothing and shelter for himself and others. When these demands can be met in less than the whole time, the remainder may be called his leisure time and this may be spent in idleness, that is, doing nothing, or it may be spent in doing something else in accordance with one's tastes, aptitudes and opportunities. One may read or study or write or travel, or one may add to one's income by working overtime or at other occupations. Such an one has leisure which he employs in ways that give him a measure of satisfaction. What is called a higher standard of living is almost always the immediate result of leisure—more palatable food, better clothes and houses. If one spends all his income to provide himself with better things than are really needful to keep him healthy, he can not say he has no leisure, for there is no limit to what may be called better things which one may possess and be no healthier or happier. Do not the so-called poor outlive the rich? Whence the centenarians of all countries, Indians, Mexicans, Negroes? Does not nature take as loving care of tramps as she does of the so-called good citizens, who faithfully work and save and build?

To be beyond compulsion to do anything is desirable, of course, for whoever is compelled is so far a slave. During the nineteenth century we were all urged by advice, example and mottoes that thrift was the chief thing. One who did not respond to the pressure was stigmatized as lazy. The hustler was the admired type from pupil to preacher. High speed has been demanded in living as well as on railroads, and he who could not or would not keep up has often had a hard time to live at all. The assumption in all this was that life should be strenuous. Our energetic President has publicly urged this. But there are many reasons for holding that it is all wasteful, loading life with miseries and not at all in accordance with Nature's plan. Nature is never in a hurry. She takes ten thousand years to make Niagara Falls and a hundred thousand years to make man, and she spares neither her own work nor man's, as if neither is worth the keeping. In Babylon of old were there not Morgans and Rockefellers, many storied buildings and great armies? Nature has transformed men and armies into gas and shrubbery, the buildings into tumuli, and made a