312 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
about nine and a half hours. Allowing nine hours for eating and sleeping, we are safe in assuming that the average labouring man has approximately five and a half hours of leisure. Within this time he must satisfy his domestic in stincts in association with his family, his social craving for contact with his fellows, his normal desire for recreation of some sort, and whatever appetite he may have for reading. His social craving will be strong, because this fundamental and ineradicable instinct has had little opportunity for satis faction in the course of his work has rather been starved ; but the circle of companionship within which it must be gratified will surely have little in it to stimulate the intellect or to refine the taste. A brain deadened by the uninterest ing monotony of his labour and unstimulated by quickening social contacts will not likely be impelled toward literature by an intense hunger for knowledge.
If he belongs to a labour union that proves to be his chief intellectual school. There he finds much satisfaction of his social desires, and there he comes in contact with the most vigorous and thoughtful personalities among his com peers, Through that medium he becomes acquainted with the literature that relates to the most obvious interests of his life. The discussions in which he there participates are crude enough, to be sure, and the literature through which his mind is brought into contact with the great world, though often strong and keen in thought, is very- narrow in its general outlook. As his daily labour is linked with tools and machinery and the material things which they are transforming, so the discussions and the literature deal with the material concerns of his life. But limited and crude as it is, the educational function of the union is of inestimable value to him and is the chief agency by which any intellectual stimulation comes to awaken thought and afford a basis for the higher development of his personality.
It must also be borne in mind that the labouring man usually lives in a city. Cities are great complex social ag gregates. There life is most highly differentiated, most
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