But from the standpoint of the individual worker the economy of a shorter work-day has a double significance.We have seen that it more than proportionately diminishes his personal cost, by cancelling the last and most costly portion of his work-day.But it also increases the human utility which he can get out of his wages.A day of exhausting toil entails the expenditure of a large portion of his wage in mere replacement of physical wear and tear, or incites to expenditure on physical excesses, while the leisure hours are hours of idleness and torpor.A reduction of the work-day will, by the larger leisure and spare energy it secures, reduce the expenditure upon mere wear and tear, and increase the expenditure upon the higher and more varied strata of the standard of comfort.More leisure will in general so alter the mode of living as to enable the worker to get more and better utility out of the expenditure of his wages.Take an extreme case.A man who toils all day long at some exhausting work, and goes home at night too tired for anything but food and sleep, so as to enable him to continue the same round to-morrow, though he may earn good wages from this toil, can get little out of them.If he were induced to work less and leave himself some time and energy for relaxation and enjoyment, he would get a larger utility out of less money income.
The matter, however, does not need labouring.It is evident that many modes of consumption depend in part, for the pleasure and gain they yield, upon the amount of time given to the consuming processes.It would be mere foolishness for a tired worker to spend money upon improving books which he had not the time and energy to digest.Shorten his hours, leave him more energy, such expenditure may be extremely profitable.Even the enjoyment and good of his meals will be increased, if he has more time and energy for wholesome processes of digestion and for the exercise which facilitates digestion.And what is true of his food will hold also of most other items in his standard of consumption.No consumption is purely passive: to get the best utility or enjoyment out of any sort of wealth, time and energy are requisite.The greater part of a workman's income goes to the upkeep of his home and family.Does the normal work-day in our strenuous age permit the bread-winner to get the full enjoyment out of home and family? He belongs perhaps to a club or a cooperative society.Can he make the most of these opportunities of education and of comradeship, if his daily toil leaves him little margin of vitality? Most of the growing public expenditure which the modern State or City lays out upon the amenities of social life, the apparatus of libraries, museums, parks, music and recreation, is half wasted because industry has trenched too much upon humanity.
§6.More leisure means an increased fund of utility or welfare got out of the income at the disposal of each worker.
This introduces us to the fuller economy of leisure regarded aS the opportunity of opportunities -- the condition of all effective social reconstruction and progress.
Consider it first in relation to industrial welfare.We have seen how society enforces its claims upon the worker by division of labour and specialisation of functions.This specialisation is usually justified by the variety of consumption which it yields.But will not this more complex and refined consumption in large part be wasted or perverted to base ends, if the producer becomes ever narrower in his productive function?
The Organic Law presses here insistently.It would be going too far, doubtless, to assert that he who can produce one thing can only consume one thing.But everyone familiar with the finer arts of Consumption will admit that a consumer who is utterly unskilled in the production of these goods cannot extract from their consumption the full enjoyment or utility which they contain.A true connoisseur of pictures must, in training and in study, be a good deal of an artist: the exquisite gourmet must be something of a cook.
In other words, our industrial civilisation offers a dangerous paradox, if it merely presents man exposed to two opposed forces, tending on the one hand to greater narrowness of production, on the other, to greater width and complexity of consumption.To solve this paradox is the first service of the large new fund of leisure which, for the first time in history, the new economies of industry render available not for a little class but for whole peoples.
The first use of leisure, then, is that it supplies a counterpoise to specialisation by the opportunity it gives for the exercise of the neglected faculties, the cultivation of neglected tastes.As the specialisation grows closer, this urgency increases.More leisure is required for the routine worker to keep him human.
In the first place, it must afford him relaxation or recreation by occupations in which the spontaneity, the liberty, the elements of novelty, increasingly precluded from his work-day, shall find expression.It must liberate him from automatism, and afford him opportunity for the creative and interesting work required to preserve in him humanity.
An eight-hours day would mean that thousands of men, who at present leave the factory or furnace, the office or the shop, in a state of physical and mental lassitude, would take a turn at gardening, or home carpentry, would read some serious and stimulating book, or take part in some invigorating game.
Thus each man would not merely get more out of each item of his economic consumption, but he would add to the net sum of his humanity, and incidentally of his economic utility, by cultivating those neglected faculties of production which yield him a positive fund of interest and human benefit.
