Liberalism and the Social Problem by Sir Winston S. Churchill
page 127 of 275 (46%)
page 127 of 275 (46%)
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coal-mining are shortest, the University Extension lecturers find that
the miners take an intelligent interest in their lectures--and it is among the miners of Fifeshire that a considerable development in gardening and also of saving to enable them to own their own houses, has followed on a longer period of leisure. But the general march of industrial democracy is not towards inadequate hours of work, but towards sufficient hours of leisure. That is the movement among the working people all over the country. They are not content that their lives should remain mere alternations between bed and the factory. They demand time to look about them, time to see their homes by daylight, to see their children, time to think and read and cultivate their gardens--time, in short, to live. That is very strange, perhaps, but that is the request they have made and are making with increasing force and reason as years pass by. No one is to be pitied for having to work hard, for nature has contrived a special reward for the man who works hard. It gives him an extra relish, which enables him to gather in a brief space from simple pleasures a satisfaction in search of which the social idler wanders vainly through the twenty-four hours. But this reward, so precious in itself, is snatched away from the man who has won it, if the hours of his labour are too long or the conditions of his labour too severe to leave any time for him to enjoy what he has won. Professor Marshall, in his "Principles of Economics," says: "The influence which the standard of hours of work exerts on economic activities is partially obscured by the fact that the earnings of a human being are commonly counted gross; no special reckoning being |
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