seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1848 and in the World War they valiantly fought side by side. The Saxons were at once endowed with special privileges by the Kings of Hungary (Decretum Andreanum, etc.) which they retained for over 800 years Serbians immigrated to Hungary in the course of the fifteenth century (George Brankovics) and later in the seventeenth century (Archbishop Csarnojevic of Ipek). Roumanians first settled in the thirteenth century, when a handful of them arrived who were endowed with certain properties by the King in Székács, Transylvania. If a plebiscite had been granted to Hungary and her minorities by the winners of the war,-who allege that they fought this war for the liberation of the smaller nations,Hungary would never have been dismembered, because the great majority of the "foreign oppressed" nationals, in spite of all propaganda, would have voted in favor of Hungary, as against alien rule.

66

The present New Europe represents in no way an alignment on racial lines, as millions of people have been bartered away merely to please the whim of a few doctrinaires. The liberation of fifty or sixty millions is a myth. Nobody with any sense of humor who knew Europe before the war and has known it since the 'peace of slavery and attrition" would venture to make such an assertion. The present day New Europe is neither politically nor economically an improvement on former conditions. It plays favorites with a comparatively few people at the expense of a large majority of miserable human beings who rebel in spirit because the tyranny of the peacemakers has enslaved them. Economic and other conditions in the basin of the Danube are abnormal and will continue so until the interested people themselves see the light and readjust matters among themselves in a fair spirit of reconciliation. This does not mean a breaking up of the new countries, but a careful revision of that arch-enemy of peace, the Treaty of Trianon, and some of the other treaties. America was never greater than when she refused to ratify these treaties. She showed common sense when the Paris peace makers showed revenge and ignorance.

ERNEST LUdwig.

VOL. CCXXIII.-No. 832

32

THE NEW LEISURE

BY CORNELIA JAMES CANNON

I

We are a nation of passionate industry. In theory, and largely in practice, work is in the saddle and rides our citizens. We have our loafers and slackers, as every generation since Adam has had, but they excite no general admiration and are not held high in public estimation. Such prophets of leisure as Thoreau and Walt Whitman, who were satisfied with the simple life and an incidental pursuit of literature, have found few imitators in our midst.

Occasionally a rich man's son has abandoned the making of money and spent his time in ways personally satisfying but commercially profitless. Such apostasy is anathema to our conscientious Babbitts. Early to arrive at the haunts of business and late to depart are the accepted habits of the God fearing and the self respecting American.

It is undeniable that strict attention to business gives results. Our steel tonnage production has become enormous, the cotton manufactured in this country could doubtless encircle the world, and travelers tell us that our automobiles rattle on every continent.

But what of it?

Suppose we are the biggest and busiest nation on earth, does it bring us any incentive save to become still bigger and busier, or offer us other reward than that of our surpassing size and activity? No one denies the essential importance of labor or its multiple values to the individual, but it is not without reason that the generations have reiterated that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Though we are a feverish nation and make a good deal of noise, must we not admit that we are somewhat like Jack at his worst?

Circumstances are, however, conspiring against our remaining dull as a consequence of a continuing preoccupation with work. Almost unnoted, leisure is bearing down upon us from every side. The eight hour working day is rapidly spreading from industry to industry. The entire working world is fighting for a short day, and the politicians are lending helping hands. No one, laborer or idler, who is at all familiar with the type of daily job upon which the great majority of workers are engaged, could wish for anything else.

The new sources of physical energy, which are being increasingly developed, are certain to reduce still further the hours of work necessary to supply the actual needs of the community. The shortened hours and the substitution of mechanical power for that of the muscles of man will, in addition, more and more remove physical fatigue as an accompaniment of work. Men and women are beginning to return from the performance of their daily tasks, no longer so jaded as to require complete inactivity or abnormal stimulus as a counter to the exhaustion of toil, but fit to fill their leisure hours with activities of a different kind.

One other factor is certain to play an important rôle in the future. Prohibition is doubtless here to stay, and will be more effectively enforced as the will of the majority makes itself increasingly felt. That means that the chief anodyne of idle hours is being eliminated. We shall no longer be able to delude ourselves into thinking we are having a pleasant and profitable time when we are merely a little befuddled by alcohol. We shall know unmistakably when we are bored.

These large social changes are bringing about a condition of affairs for which we find ourselves unprepared. In our national recognition of the worth and dignity of labor, and in our devotion to its pursuit, we have neglected the uses and significance of leisure. Our educational system, which is a barometer registering the pressure of our enthusiasms, has for years stressed vocational training. Not only have we taught vocations in the classroom, but of late we have sent our teachers into the factories and shops to teach the worker on the job. Our commercial courses and our trade schools have been designed to feed the young people, trained to the last detail, directly into industry.

Those schoolmen who have protested against such rank utilitarianism have been denounced as old fogies, or have been mere voices crying in the wilderness. Efficiency has demanded results, and we have allowed the pay envelope of the graduate to become the criterion of a school's success.

This might be all very well if men were mechanized, or if work occupied the whole of life. But human beings have so far resisted all attempts to make them into machines, and the fortyeight hour working week, even after hours for sleep have been deducted, leaves, to be disposed of at the individual's will, sixtyfour hours of freedom. The modern workingman, in the most advanced industries, has now many more hours for leisure than for work. Every effort of the community has heretofore been devoted to preparing him for efficient performance during the forty-eight hours. The use of the sixty-four hours has been largely left to exploitation by the commercial forces which profit by the idleness of resourceless humanity.

There is a challenge to our whole educational system in this development of a new leisure class. Ours has been a vocational educational system in a vocation-minded civilization. We have never been whole-heartedly in sympathy with the educational frills forced upon us by educators who would not admit that earning a living was the be-all and end-all of life. We have ignored germinating enthusiasms, we have not cultivated a love of life's diversities, and we have subordinated training in appreciation of the beauties and mysteries of the world about us to mastery of the mathematician's table, the surveyor's transit, the typewriter, the forge, and the turning lathe.

We have seen our national duty as that of developing our country and opening up its resources. Felling the trees for the clearing, organizing the mine for rapid production, rolling the steel into sheathing for ships, has kept us busy. We have tumbled into our beds, exhausted but triumphant, to sleep off the day's weariness and be fresh for the next day's strain.

Such hurried plowing and harrowing of the capacities of youth has not mellowed the soil for the seeds of leisure. We find ourselves unprepared to display the graces of an advanced civilization, which, so far in history, have not been the product of a

twelve-hour day in a foundry. Nevertheless here is leisure knocking at our door. The alarmist sees no alternative save exchanging stupidity for sin. He is confident that, when Satan finds men freed from the plow, the tool, and the ledger, he will impress their idle hands into working for his nefarious ends. We cannot quite share such pessimism, but there is a responsibility upon us to see that the new leisure means enrichment of life and not impoverishment.

II

We should like to use the word "avocation" to describe the activities which add, not to the financial gain of the individual, but to his joy and to his intellectual and spiritual betterment. But the dictionary stands like a rock in the way. Ponderously, inviting no rebuttal, it stresses the beauty of a life of vocational dedication, and gives moral sanction to the barren pursuit of the dollar by defining avocation as "that which calls one away from one's proper business". The only mollification lies in the illustrative quotation: "Heaven is his vocation, and therefore he counts earthly employments avocation." No matter how set his heart might be upon eternal salvation, he would be a rare enthusiast who could get a thrill out of regarding the selling of hardware as an avocation. We shall be forced to seek for some other word to describe what avocation is not allowed to mean.

Fortunately the dictionary compensates for its glacial definition of avocation by the genial spirit in which it expounds the meaning of hobby. A hobby is "any favorite object, pursuit, or topic, that which a person persistently pursues or dwells upon with zeal and delight".

Many persons dig ditches, or sell silk, or pour molten steel into molds, or load freight cars, or clean office buildings, or run elevators, but seldom with "zeal and delight". Few individuals lack the capacity to be stirred and refreshed by the use and exercise of such emotions, and many are the hours of leisure to be illuminated by their cultivation, and the hours of boredom to be held at bay by their help.

What better way is there for us to meet our changing social and working conditions than by cultivating hobbies, not to