No one will deny the theoretical desirability of reducing excessive hours of work, but let it be clearly understood that the present successful efforts in that direction, whether they be statutory eight-hour day in Europe or the abolition of the 12-hour day in continuous work in the iron and steel industry of the United States, are in the nature of an economic restriction, which while conferring more ease upon the worker tend inevitably to impair the scale of living of people as a whole. There is a stubborn refusal to recognize that the essential thing for every country of the world at the present time is simpler living and harder work by wage earners. The exigency is more acute in some countries than in others. In Italy, a relatively poor country, the people found themselves constrained to bow to this in order to avoid early disaster. In the United States, a very rich country, the need is less acute and more obscure, but the hard times of our farmers and white-collar classes show that it exists.
One of the main reasons for the slow recovery in Europe from the effects of the war undoubtedly is the shortening of the hours of labor and the increase in the cost of manufactured and mineral products and of transportation that has resulted from this policy. It was, in fact, stupid to curtail production at a time when the greatest possible production was needed. It was done on the hypothesis that the scale of living for the workers should and could be raised and that it should and could be done at the expense of the employers, which, of course, proved to be a grotesque fallacy.
