Chapter VIII: The Physiology and Pathology of Work and Fatigue

There is a limit to man’s power of doing work. This varies in different individuals. In an ordinary way work is conducive to health, and even under abnormal circumstances work is often the main factor that tends to prolong life. Mental not less than physical occupation has been known to raise men and women above worries that otherwise would have crushed them and lifted them above the depressing influences of an incurable malady. In itself work is a good thing. It is when we come to consider the effects of overwork and fatigue in an age when all is hurry and excitement, when every one is pressed, and work is undertaken under such unhealthy conditions as exist in some overheated, overcrowded, and ill-ventilated factories, that one of the worst sides of excessive toil is seen. In order to understand more fully the evils of overwork and fatigue, physical and mental, let us learn something of the physiological conditions under which muscular work is performed.

We are frequently reminded that the human body resembles a steam-engine. From the circulation within the body of the absorbed products obtained from digested food are evolved those chemical and mechanical forces which direct all work, physical and mental. The human body differs from the steam-engine in being able to transform some of the food products into living tissue, whereby during work it calls upon its stored-up energy and loses weight. Human life can only be supported by oxygen and the ingestion of foods of vegetable or animal origin. In the internal laboratory of the human body chemical changes are continually taking place, resulting in the formation of such waste products as carbonic acid, water, and urea. These have to be removed by the lungs, the kidneys, and skin. A pure atmosphere, healthy surroundings, and an adequate supply of water and proper food, are therefore required in order to introduce into the system the ordinary necessaries of life. Health can only be maintained by a normal functional activity of the emunctories, whereby waste products are eliminated.

All organs when in a state of greater functional activity than usual draw to them, by a kind of automatic arrangement of the nervous system, a larger supply of blood. The demand upon the muscles of the labourer is met by an increased flow of blood at the time, therefore, when most required, and when changes within his muscular system are most active. In a similar fashion, a quickening of the cerebral circulation occurs during the processes of thinking and mental attention. We are, however, at this particular part of our inquiry concerned rather with that large army of workers, men, women, and young persons, who are either day or weekly wage earners, whose life is one of hard toil, and who in reaching home of an evening are frequently tired out with the day’s labour. Work while physiologically making for health may, if pushed too far so as to induce fatigue, ultimately unfit the individual for his allotted task.

By means of an instrument known as the _ergograph_, physiologists can estimate the amount of muscular work done. We can thus learn something of the laws of muscular activity and of fatigue in man. Work is only done by muscle when it is contracting. By means of the ergograph we can register the character, the frequency, and rhythm of these contractions, and estimate the weight of a load lifted, or the amount of work accomplished, in a given time. In addition to the physical work accomplished, heat is also generated within the muscle, and certain waste products are formed which escape by the veins and lymphatics. A healthy fresh muscle responds practically at once to an electrical stimulus, but when it has been over stimulated so that the individual muscular contractions follow each other too rapidly, the tissue becomes fatigued and no longer responds to the induction shocks. The ergograph shows us the manner in which we become fatigued. Professor Mosso, of Turin University, found that the instrument registers very much the same results in the same people over a period of years, allowing for certain minor modifications depending upon the conditions of the organism, the state of health at the time, diet, sleep, and the amount of intellectual fatigue present at the moment. We are all familiar with the influence of volition upon muscular contraction. By a strong effort of will we can force our jaded muscles still to accomplish work, but in doing so we often add to the muscular tiredness a sense of brain fatigue as well. There is a marked difference in the character and amount of work done by muscles that have been gradually trained compared with that done by those not so prepared. Professor Aducco found that at the end of a month, after having practised a few hours daily with the ergograph, he could perform twice the amount of muscular work than he could at the commencement. A moderate amount of work, physical and mental, is attended by a feeling of pleasurable satisfaction. It is when work is carried too far, and when a man’s daily labour becomes too hard, or makes lengthened and unusual demands upon his strength, that there is experienced a sense of extreme weariness and fatigue. When a muscle has become fatigued its irritability is lessened. It no longer contracts with the same vigour, less energy is set free, and the muscle relaxes and regains its original form less quickly. Under any circumstances energy is only liberated at the expense of the nutriment stored up within the muscle and the oxygen absorbed from the blood. A process akin to oxidation takes place within the muscle during its contraction whereby waste products are formed that act as poisons to the muscle protoplasm. Muscle is only capable of doing work so long as energy holding explosive compounds are formed within it and the waste products are excreted.

What, then, causes fatigue? Since during muscular contraction oxygen is absorbed, and carbonic acid and other waste materials are formed, fatigue might in the first instance be considered as dependent upon processes of a chemical nature, and be due to the non-removal of the harmful substances formed by muscle when doing work. That fatigue is largely the result of this is shown by passing some simple saline solution through the blood-vessels of a limb removed from a recently killed animal, and where the muscles of the limb have been thrown into a state of fatigue by excessive stimulation. As the liquid percolates through the muscles and washes out the waste products, fatigue disappears, and the muscular contractions on stimulation become again as vigorous as they were before. Over-use of muscles obliges us to breathe more frequently. By increased frequency of respiration the temperature of the body is lowered owing to evaporation of water from the interior of the lungs. Add to this the cooling influence of the air inspired, for it is of lower temperature than that within the lung. Respiration too is the medium through which we throw off the excess of carbonic acid from the blood. As long ago as 1845, Helmholtz, a German physiologist, demonstrated that when a muscle is in a state of repose it contains very few substances that are soluble in alcohol. For the sake of comparison we shall name this amount 1. In fatigued muscle the quantity of these soluble substances rises to 1.3. Healthy muscle in repose has an alkaline chemical reaction, fatigued muscle is acid. Some of the substances formed during muscular contraction possess distinctly poisonous properties and are toxic to the individual himself. While fatigue is induced by local conditions in the muscles, the sense of tiredness which we experience is the result of general rather than local causes. During the course of a long walk, or a day’s hard toil, the muscles are constantly forming waste products which it is the function of the internal organs to throw out of the system. It is not deprivation of food, for example, that is the cause of fatigue, although it may be contributory. The real cause is the circulation in the blood of fatigue products. These act upon the nerve-endings in muscle and paralyse them, and they also act upon certain portions of our brain, and create the sense of fatigue. Ranke made an aqueous extract of fatigued but otherwise healthy muscle, and taking the poisonous substances he injected them into a living muscle that had been removed from a recently killed animal, with the result that its power of doing work at once diminished. Were it not for the watchful activity of our emunctory organs, _e.g._, the liver, kidneys, skin, and bowels, the human body would soon be poisoned by the toxic substances formed within the system. The sensation of fatigue is due to the temporary retention of these harmful substances. The blood of a fatigued animal is more poisonous than that of a healthy one which has been in a state of quietude for some time previously. When some of this blood is injected into a healthy animal, it induces the phenomena of fatigue. If, for example, the blood of a fatigued dog is injected into a healthy one, the receiving dog will shortly afterwards show signs of fatigue, creep into a corner and go to sleep. The effect of hard work upon the blood is also shown in a diminution of its hæmoglobin or colouring matter. When we are mentally tired, it would seem as if the sensation of fatigue was located in or depended upon certain conditions of particular portions of our brain, for if we change the subject of meditation or take up some game that requires even a great amount of thought, _e.g._, chess, the sensation of tiredness often disappears. It is difficult to prove whether brain or muscular work is the more fatiguing. It depends upon the training, the occupation, and constitution of the individual. The personal element is a factor in fatigue that cannot be ignored. _Prima facie_, owing to nerve tissue being the more highly organised, this circumstance suggests that the brain would be the more easily fatigued. Against that must be placed the fact that the muscles form a much larger portion of the body by weight than the nervous system, and consequently within them must be formed a much larger amount of poisonous waste material. Some people we know are more easily tired than others, both mentally and physically. There is for each person apparently a definite rate of muscular contraction essential to the amount of work accomplished in a given time. If this is true for the muscular, it is none the less so for the nervous system. People who have inherited a weak nervous system become readily exhausted, even with very little work, and they recuperate slowly. They are said to suffer from neurasthenia, or nerve weakness. In addition to muscular work being accompanied by the production of toxic substances, it should be remembered that the individual is perhaps standing all day at work in a heated factory, and as a consequence of the fatigue the circulation becomes languid, and his feet swell. Muscle can after all do only a limited amount of work, and in order to recover from fatigue there must be a period of repose or relaxation. This raises the question of the number of hours per day a man should work, also the length of the break for the mid-day meal. On the Continent the mid-day break is in some factories longer than it is in this country, but the work is carried on further into the evening. It is admitted that in iron works and factories, where the hours of labour have been unusually long, say ten and eleven hours, the work done in the latter part of the day is not so good as that done in the forenoon, and managers say that where the experiment has been tried, the men have turned out in eight hours an amount of work equal to what was previously done in nine. The problem can only be solved by experience. It is right to mention that fatigue does not always, or necessarily, depend upon the amount of work done. A good deal depends on the state of the body at the time. We know that good work can never be done by a tired brain or fatigued muscles, and that the amount of work accomplished is always greater where the limit of exhaustion has never been reached. If we are tired and feel that we have to make a fresh spurt to accomplish something, the end, it is true, may be gained, but it is by using up a certain amount of reserve force stored away in our muscles, and by making an additional demand upon our nervous system. The physical fact of muscular fatigue has its psychical counterpart in the sensation of tiredness. When muscular work is light and of short duration there may be only a sense of weight, but if the labour has been hard there may be a sensation of actual pain which continues for a time. Intellectual work when carried on too long and without sufficient recreation, interferes with the innervation of the heart and blood-vessels. In cerebral fatigue there are often languor, or its opposite restlessness; the pulse may be small and excitable; the head hot, the feet cold, and there may be noises complained of in the head. The nervous control of the blood-vessels is destroyed, so that while the extremities are cold and their blood-vessels small and contracted, those of the brain may be dilated and overfilled. Protracted brain work is followed by irritability of temper, by inability to concentrate the attention and to reason out problems. It becomes an effort to think. There is headache, for the brain is, in a similar manner to the muscles, affected by the circulation through it of waste products. These at first, like alcohol, may stimulate and excite the brain, but they end by paralysing it. It is an interesting fact that while the brain is particularly sensitive to the action upon it of poisonous substances and of an altered circulation, as seen, _e.g._, in bilious headache, the headache of kidney disease, plumbism, etc., the surface of the brain is insensitive to touch, as is demonstrated in cases of injury to the skull where the brain is protruding. The brain can be gently touched without any sensation being experienced; if there is any at all, it is certainly not one of pain; any effects that follow are the result of pressure. While insensitive to a great extent to touch, the surface of the brain will respond to an electrical stimulus. Levy (_British Medical Journal_, 13th September 1900), after stimulating the motor areas of an animal’s brain by electricity, found that fatigue was rapidly induced, and when this occurred, that the brain failed to respond to fresh stimulation until after a period of rest. When interruptedly stimulated, so that there are periods of rest, the brain does not become readily fatigued, but is rendered capable of expending a greater amount of energy.

Hodge (_Journal of Morphology_, 1892) has studied the effects of work upon nerve structures. He found after prolonged electrical stimulation of spinal nerves certain structural alterations in the cells of the ganglion on their posterior root. When the nerves were over-stimulated the cells became shrunken, their protoplasm crenated and vacuolated. The amount of shrinkage was proportional to the length of stimulation, _e.g._, if it was continued for--

1 hour there was 22 per cent. }
2.5 hours „ 21 „ } Shrinkage in volume
5 „ „ 24 „ } of the nuclei of the
10 „ „ 44 „ } stimulated cells.

Hodge’s experiments demonstrate that there is a relation between the amount of structural change in nerves and the length of time during which the stimulus has been applied. The influence of rest in restoring the cells to their normal size was equally apparent. In order to determine how far these changes were really dependent upon work, Hodge examined the nerve-cells of birds and bees after a day’s work and after a night’s rest. At the beginning of the day, when the animal had rested over night, the nerve-cells were found to be large and turgid, and with prominent nuclei, but after a day’s work, the contents of the cells were vacuolated and shrunken, and their nuclei altered in shape.

Dr Guido Guerrini (_Lancet_, 21st October 1899, and 10th November 1900) confirms the statement just made, that as a result of fatigue the nerve centres exhibit certain alterations of structure. Beyond being more vascular than usual, a fatigued brain does not exhibit anything special to the naked eye. Guerrini caused dogs to run a certain mileage every day, but it was not until they had covered a distance varying from 22 to 61 miles that they appeared fatigued. On examining their brain microscopically, he found the lymphatic spaces around the cells distended, the chromatin network of the brain-cells changed, and the pigment disintegrated, while the protoplasm exhibited numerous vacuoles, the outline of the nucleus was irregular, and its contents vacuolated. These changes were always proportional to the amount of fatigue undergone by the animal, and were most pronounced in those parts of the brain known as the motor areas, _i.e._, those which innervate the muscles. The cause of these alterations of structure in nerve-cells in fatigue is the circulation in the blood of waste products formed during work. The presence of this waste material in the blood not only creates a sense of fatigue, but so alters the structure of nerve-cells that they require a lengthened period of repose before they become quite recuperated. Additional changes were found by Guerrini in the liver and kidneys. On examining these organs in fatigued dogs, he found that there were changes in the cells of the convoluted tubules of the kidney, and in the loops of Henle. The cells were observed to be larger and more brittle than in health, so that they readily disintegrated and filled the tubules with _débris_, in the midst of which the liberated nuclei could be seen. The liver cells too were found to be enlarged, and the seat of cloudy swelling, which is always one of the earliest indications of pathological change occurring in cell protoplasm.

In considering the question of work and fatigue, there are in addition certain other factors that cannot be ignored, for example: (1) the social conditions in operation upon the individual at birth, and during his upbringing; (2) habits such as the use of alcohol; (3) the atmosphere in which his work is carried on; and (4) the nature of his employment, and the number of hours per day spent at it.

Roughly speaking, the working classes may be divided into artisans, the majority of whom make good wages, are well housed, well clad, and well fed; and into labourers, who do unskilled work, whose occupation is irregular, and who, when out of work, are not well fed.

To some even of the regularly employed labouring classes, when the family is large and the wages small, or where work is interrupted on account of recurrent ill-health, life is a hardship, and the children are occasionally more or less deprived of their proper food; while in the case of the textile industries where women are employed in the factories, the infants, bereft of maternal attention and proper nutriment, necessarily suffer. The children born in the alleys of our large towns cannot, as they grow to manhood, be possessed of that well-developed bodily frame required to fit them for undertaking hard muscular work. The offspring of parents, both of whom work in textile or jute factories, are inferior in size and general physique to children born under healthy surroundings and under more normal conditions. When these grow up and enter the factory as half-timers, their rate of growth lags far behind that of children of their own age who still remain at school. The trend of civilisation is for hard manual labour to be more and more replaced by machinery in all industries. By some social economists, however, as we shall see later on, this is not always regarded as an unmixed benefit. When a child commences work and earns a weekly wage he is to that extent more able to procure the additional food his growing frame requires. From this point of view the object is good; and if only the physical labour is gradually undertaken, is not too long, and is tempered to the strength of the juvenile worker, the training, like the muscular exercises alluded to in the earlier part of this paper, may be beneficial than otherwise. It is not always thus, however, with children who go into factories. Children brought from the country, and with good physique to start with, will be found after two years’ work in a mill in a large town to exhibit a smaller rate of growth than those who engage in outdoor work. The children of the poorer classes commence life at a great disadvantage compared with those of the well-to-do. There is more sickness, and the death-rate among them is higher, owing very largely to bad feeding, exposure, and neglect. Pagliani found as a consequence of women continuing to do hard muscular work when _enceinte_, and commencing their industrial duties again too soon after their confinement, even though giving their infants the breast, that the children were of shorter stature and of feebler force than those not similarly treated. A fairly reliable test of the effect of severe manual labour upon children in Continental countries is seen in the large number of conscripts rejected from military service on account of some physical disqualification. In no place perhaps more than in Sicily are the harmful effects of fatigue and exhaustion on young people so apparent. An excessive proportion of the conscripts who had been in their earlier years engaged in carrying heavy baskets of sulphur out of the mines near Catania are found to be physically feeble, ill-developed, and unfit for military service. Is a similar condition of things, although to a minor degree, not taking place in our own country? The standard of height and of chest measurement required of recruits is not rising but falling. The improper feeding, bad housing, imperfect clothing, and absence of pure air in the home, which are the lot of an increasing number of the poorer working classes, are not the conditions that favour the development of such healthy labouring people as are required to enable us as an industrial community to compete with other nations, perhaps more favourably circumstanced. The point is, whether in this respect other nations do not come under the same ban as ourselves.

After work there must be relaxation, in order that an opportunity may be given for the muscles to recuperate, and for waste products to be removed. For working men, physical rest and recreation, sleeping in good air amid healthy surroundings, are desiderata, and yet how few there be who find these. With the toil of the day over, home reached and supper finished, there is little in the immediate dingy surroundings that is attractive, and so the working men saunter out to the nearest street corner to converse with their comrades, or adjourn to a public-house, where in an overheated bar and ill-ventilated rooms the remaining hours of the evening are spent. Nor is the married working woman much better off, so far as rest is concerned, for after her day’s work in the factory she attempts to overtake, often unaided, her neglected maternal and domestic duties. It is desirable that healthy recreation for our working classes should be provided to a greater extent than it is. In this matter employers could do a great deal. The proper housing of the working classes is even a greater need. How can the poorer working men have good health, good morals, and be long lived, when they do not have in their homes and surroundings those conditions that enable them, during periods of relaxation, to sleep well, and to eliminate by their lungs and skin the waste materials formed during toil. After all, we are each of us, physically and mentally, very much what the circumstances of life make us. Personal, not less than national character, is partly moulded by external surroundings.

The habits of the poorer working classes, too, as regards alcohol are not without their bearing upon this important question. It is a subject, therefore, upon which there should be some definite expression of opinion, especially since both at home and abroad there is a belief that alcohol is a necessity for the working classes. This matter has been recently brought to the front in France by the socialist leader, M. Fournière, in an address delivered to working men, the gist of whose argument is, that alcohol is a hydrocarbon, capable of supplying during combustion within the body the necessary elements for muscular work, and that therefore it is a food. Among foods of the hydrocarbon type Fournière places alcohol in the first rank. He maintains that the insufficient food of the workman imposes upon him the necessity for alcohol; his hard work creates a desire for it. Alcoholism as a social infirmity is therefore regarded as a direct consequence of the excessive demands made upon the muscular system by present-day labour. This is dangerous teaching to working men, and cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged. The insufficient food of the working man is in many instances the result of his small wages and uncertainty of employment, but it is a monstrous evil for any political leader to recommend him to spend more of his wages upon drink. Money purchases less alcohol than food; besides, what is spent upon alcohol is consumed by the individual himself, leaving less of the wages, therefore, to be spent on food for his wife and family. It is pandering to selfishness, and the teaching tends to encourage the idea that what a man produces by his labour he has a sole right to spend upon himself, leaving to Society the care of those who are naturally his own. But quite apart from this side of the question, what is the teaching of physiology?[41] It can be shown that the administration of alcohol in more than moderate doses is followed by a diminution of muscular energy, which fresh doses of the stimulant do not readily compensate; that to the period of excitement there succeeds one of depression, so that in a given time the amount of work accomplished under alcohol is less than that done without it. I think I may safely say that no literary man ever did his best work under the influence of alcohol. In moderate quantities alcohol stimulates the brain for a brief period, and quickens the flow of ideas, but this is followed by a reaction of depression. In a paper read before the Académie des Sciences, January 1901, M. A. Chauveau detailed the results of his experiments upon alcohol and muscular work. He set himself this problem: how far a man who works and whose blood is saturated with alcohol obtains from the combustion of alcohol the energy necessary for the functional activity of his muscles? In order to estimate this he measured the “respiratory quotient,” that is to say, the relation existing between the volume of carbonic acid excreted and the amount of oxygen absorbed. His conclusions are drawn mostly from dogs. In an ordinary way meat and sugar were administered to these animals, and subsequently for 84 grammes of sugar 48 of alcohol were substituted. Under the normal feeding the mean respiratory quotient was 0.963, but during the period of the administration of alcohol it only reached 0.922. Chauveau proved by this and other means that alcohol is not utilised as potential energy either for the execution of physiological functions acting together in a state of repose or for muscular work during states of activity. In substituting alcohol for sugar he found in a given time--(1) a diminution of muscular work; (2) loss of body weight, and (3) increased expenditure of energy relative to the amount of work accomplished. We are familiar with the fact of the large quantities of stout consumed by the London dock labourers, who, either as the result of experience or imagination, have come to look upon malt liquor as a necessity and as a food. Without denying the fact of stout in small quantities when taken with food supplementing, through its hydrocarbons and the sugar it contains, muscular energy, it can only to a limited extent contribute to those combustion processes from which the muscular system derives the necessary energy for its functional activity. Reverting for the moment to Chauveau’s experiments, it was found that during the period of normal feeding a dog ran a distance of 23.924 kilometres every day in two hours, and that its weight increased 1.245 kilos.; but during an equal length of time when it was taking alcohol instead of sugar, the distance coursed in the two hours daily was only 18.666 kilometres, and its weight fell 115 grammes. It is true that we cannot apply _in toto_ the results of this experiment to man, but they are not without their meaning. Sugar is a well recognised muscle food. The experiment shows us that in dogs, when alcohol is substituted for sugar, the result is not to the advantage of the individual. There is a diminution in the amount of work done. More than this, alcohol tends, and the more impure it is the greater the tendency, to load the blood with harmful substances, and to induce pathological changes in such of the eliminating organs of the body as the liver and kidneys. Even admitting that it may contribute to the production of muscular energy, it imposes upon these organs a greater burden than a proportional quantity of food, and thus it happens that as a consequence of the circulation within the body of the toxic substances formed in muscle during work and of those derived from alcohol, also the fact that alcohol checks the power of the liver and kidneys to throw off the toxic material circulating in the blood, there are induced at an early age in working men who are intemperate, pathological changes in the liver, kidneys, and nervous system, structural alterations which play a very large part in the causation of the high death-rate of the poorer working classes.

In considering the question of fatigue of working people we must not overlook the nature of their employment, the rooms in which the labour is carried on, and the number of hours daily spent in work. When the air in a factory is close, and is not renewed frequently enough, there is an impediment to the escape of carbonic acid from the lungs, and when the air is overheated and moist, the natural cooling of the body through respiration cannot occur. Labour carried on under these conditions entails an additional tax upon the strength of the workers and burdens their system with impurities. We live in an age that creates, because there is a demand for, labour-saving machinery. The introduction of steam has revolutionised industry. Manufacturers keep increasing their production and throwing goods in larger quantity and at lower price upon the market. Machinery acts with unerring uniformity. At times so simple is its mechanism that a child can almost guide it, yet how exacting are its demands. While machinery has in some senses lightened the burden of human toil, it has not diminished fatigue in man. All through the hours of work in a factory the hum of the wheels never ceases. Requiring constant attention, to stop the machinery running is to lose money, and so men and women are obliged to wrestle with the forces of steam and mechanical ingenuity. While the machinery pursues its relentless course and is insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious, especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal, for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. In many factories the system of double shifts allows the work to be carried on by night as well as by day. It is not urged that where double shifts of men are employed and the work conducted in well-ventilated factories, the shifts alternating every fortnight (night being the ordained period for man’s rest) with no Sunday labour and Saturday afternoons off, that the double shift system is necessarily prejudicial to health. But what shall we say of double shifts that practically never know of any interruption? A short while ago I visited a large iron works on the Continent where steel rails were being made. By means of a day and night shift the work went on continuously. On the occasion of my second visit to the works at eleven o’clock at night I met with a strange sight. The men were working almost naked; they were only wearing loose, coarse cotton garments like shortened nightdresses, and even in these they were bathed in perspiration. As they flitted about in the darkness, lit up by the lurid glare of the furnaces, they looked more like demons than men. For nearly seven years had the furnaces been going almost without cessation. From the first day of one year to the commencement of that following, Sunday, Saturday, and Christmas Day, the men had worked their particular shift, never knowing what twenty-four hours’ respite from labour was unless when off ill. The company pensioned the men when they were too ill or too old to work, and gave them a house with a small garden and pasturage for a cow; but what availed these when the best years of the workmen’s lives had flown and the enfeebling influences of old age had fallen upon them? The men were old at the age of forty, and many of them were broken down in health. It is the continuous demands made by machinery that are so trying, there being no time left for relaxation. Presentday factory labour is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive iron, and yet, apart from an appropriate shortening of the hours of labour, it is difficult to see how this can be remedied. The greater the number of hours machinery runs per day the larger is the output for the manufacturer, but the feebler are the human limbs that guide it. To the machine time is nothing; to the human being, each hour that passes beyond a well-defined limit means increasing fatigue and exhaustion. There are some social economists, Marx among others, who maintain that while machinery has diminished the price of products it has made the lot of the worker worse, since by disregarding human strength it has introduced into factories a larger number of women, thereby reducing wages and diminishing the number of men required; so that, while there has followed a diminution in the number of hours of employment, the tension when at work is greater, and the output larger, thus resulting in more work being done. Machinery, too, by obliging man to do and to keep at one particular detail of work, is reducing him to a mere unit, and causing him to be ignorant of the other processes of manufacture, and to be less and less the handy man of an age now all but past. It remains to be seen how far this enforced relegation of man’s labour to the production of one particular product is for his own ultimate good and that of Society.

There is, it seems to me, too great a tendency even on the part of working men themselves to insist upon uniformity in regard to the number of hours they shall be employed. This is seen in the attempt to nationalise an eight hours’ day for coal-miners, when it is known that in Northumberland and Durham they do not work eight hours from bank to bank. There are local and social conditions that cannot be ignored, and before which the leaders of working men must bow. As regards dangerous trades, it goes without saying that the number of hours spent daily in a factory should be fewer than in healthy trades or in outdoor occupations; and a similar remark applies to those industries in which the work is hard and makes severe demands upon the muscular system of the labourers. It was surely never meant that work should be other than invigorating to man, and educive of all that is best within him. Healthy persons, therefore, should work to keep healthy; those who do not work, miss one of the greatest charms of life and stimuli to health. Fatigue is not due to work but to overwork, and excess of every kind is injurious.

THOMAS OLIVER.