Conditions for Efficient Labor

motives leading to careful preparation for regular industry. They breed the notion that wealth is more dependent on chance or jobbery than on efficient service. Dishonesty in private business means the use of energy not to produce wealth, not to add to the sum for all to enjoy, but to get it from some one else. Public corruption and commercial dishonesty alike entail upon the industrious both immediate loss and the far greater cost of weakened character, relaxed energy, and decreased efficiency of labor.

§ 6. Effect of caste upon efficiency.

It may be said gener ally that customs and social ideals that raise or depress hope and ambition, affect efficiency. The institution called caste, which fixes the place of the worker and makes it impossible to rise out of the social position in which he is born, and dis graceful to do any work reserved to other castes, is depressing to energy. It exists in some form throughout the world, and where it is not called by that name, the same caste spirit is at work. The European peasants in the Middle Ages lived under the shadow of it. Where slavery exists the master class at times feels its hardships. "It is not so hard to live," says the hungry Creole daughter in "The Grandissimes," "but it is hard to be ladies. . . . We are compelled not to make a liv ing. Look at me : I can cook, but I must not cook ; I am skil ful with the needle, but I must not take in sewing; I could keep accounts ; I could nurse the sick ; but I must not." No where in the world is there less caste than in America, but it is here. The negro's low measure of industrial efficiency is partly the cause of so-called race feeling against him, but in the case of the more capable individuals it may be partly the effect of that feeling. To close to a capable worker all but the menial occupations is to weaken his motives for effort.

§ 7. American democracy and efficiency.

Democracy has made for the efficiency of American industry much as have the great natural resources. America's rapid advance in in dustrial lines has been favored by her ideas and institutions.

The many rewards open to personal merit and the chance for every worker to improve his position, have helped to stimulate here to greater energy and to a faster working pace in most grades of labor than is found elsewhere in the world. There is danger that under the new conditions of population and industry something of the spirit of enterprise will be lost. To Western eyes already the young men in the older

East seem to be trammeled by social conventions. In an older community there is less of hopeful ambition; one's position depends more on what his fathers achieved ; in the new com munity, more on what he does himself. If it is true, as wise students declare, that the frontier has been the nursery of our democratic ideas, we may well ask what effect the closing of the frontier will have on our national sentiment and on our material prosperity.

§ 8. Balance of advantage between work and leisure. Custom and national temperament affect the efficiency of labor by determining the normal period of labor-time. After the bare necessities of life are provided for, the worker has a wide or narrow margin of productive energy to use as he pleases. If four hours' work a day would enable him to live, will he work longer or will he stop t The answer is deter mined by the balance between the value of leisure and the value of labor's product. Is the lure of the fruits of addi tional hours of labor stronger than the desire for idleness? Does the pain of toil repel more than its fruits attract? In dividual differences are plainly expressed when each man labors on his own field. The prudent man, in the old maxims, makes hay while the sun shines and plows deep while sluggards sleep. National and religious holidays in some countries make an enormous loss of time from industry a patriotic and pious duty. The use made of spare time differs according to cli mate, race, and temperament. In the tropics the margin is converted usually into loafing, in the temperate zones largely into objective forms of enjoyment. In the modern large or ganization of industry, working hours are much the same for all workers in the establishment. Individual preferences are still expressed, however, in irregularity of employment. In the South some manufacturers have found that on an average the negroes will work in a factory not more than five or six hours a day, perhaps working ten hours for four days and staying away two days a week. Such limited working hours mark a primitive standard of desires and primitive industrial qualities, altho a shortening of the long working day of ten or twelve hours, as incomes increase above bare subsist ence, is in accord with a rational valuation of leisure. A moderate change in that direction can not but increase rather than diminish the efficiency of labor.