240 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
agerial capacities are also brought into play, and the labor forces are 
organized and directed with greater efficiency and economy. 
The other force developed by reduced hours is the great impetus 
given to the intellectual and artistic life of the worker, in consequence 
of the added leisure. 
Every invention is essentially democratic in its character. It will 
do for the many, more than it will do for the few. 
Schilling’s article indicates that, by the time it was written, 
labor theory was adjusting itself to the conditions imposed on it 
by the more exacting requirements of advancing economic 
analysis. The somewhat indeterminate wage thinking character- 
istic of the earlier eight-hour movement was becoming pro- 
gressively impossible. It is not intended to suggest any direct 
influence of the academic economists on the thinking of labor 
leaders; for such would be difficult to trace. None the less, the 
labor men were coming more and more to recognize a connection 
between wages and product, and with that growing recognition, 
the old eight-hour fire burned dimmer and dimmer, whatever 
might be the actual gains in achieving eight hours as part of a 
program of hard-headed labor reforms. 
The turn of the century, then, may be said to mark quite cer- 
tainly the ending of the eight-hour movement as a really sig- 
nificant element in Federation thinking. It is perhaps not mere 
coincidence that it marks, too, the beginning of a long period of 
intellectual stagnation in the Federation, a stagnation from 
which it was aroused only by the events of the war and the 
years following. Certain reasons for such a development are not 
hard to find. In the first place, Mr. Gompers had passed the half- 
century mark, and few men acquire many new ideas during their 
second fifty years. Then the mere working of the machinery of 
organization had in itself become a tremendous task, absorbing 
the energy and thought of the Federation leaders. The conflict 
with the anti-union manufacturers was growing more intense, and 
the unionists spent more and more time in the vain effort to pre- 
vent themselves from being entangled in legal red tape. The 
simplicity of the earlier contests, in which the unadorned threat 
of a strike largely served to bring unorganized employers to terms, 
gave place to the endless economic, political and legal com-