d
output upon the length of the working day has been tested in
numberless places with the methods of really exact research, as it was
easy to find out how the achievement of the laborers became
quantitatively and qualitatively changed by the shortening of the
working hours.

When in one civilized country after another the exhaustingly long
working days of the industrial wage-earner were shortened more and
more, the theoretical discussions of the legislators and of the social
reformers were soon supplemented by careful statistical inquiries in
the factories. It was found that everywhere, even abstracting from all
other cultural and social interests, a moderate shortening of the
working day did not involve loss, but brought a direct gain. The
German pioneer in the movement for the shortening of the workingman's
day, Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the greatest German factories,
wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours,
that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a
reduction of the day's product, but an increase, and that this
increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the
intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way.[41]
This conviction of Abbe still seems to hold true after millions of
experiments over the whole globe. But the problem of fatigue has
forced itself on the consideration of the men of affairs from still
another side. It has been well known for a long while how intimate the
relations are between fatigue and industrial accidents. The statistics
of the various countries and of the various industries do not
harmonize exactly, but a close connection between the number of
accidents and the hours of the day can be recognized everywhere.
Usually the greatest number of injuries occurs between ten and eleven
o'clock in the forenoon and between three and four o'clock in the
afternoon. The different distribution of the working hours, and of the
pauses for the meals, make the various statistical tables somewhat
incomparable. But it can be traced everywhere that in the first
working hours in which fatigue does not play any considerable role,
the number of accidents is small, and that this number sinks again
after the long pauses. It is true that the number also becomes
somewhat smaller at the end of the forenoon and of the afternoon
period, but this seems to have its cause in the fact that with growing
fatigue and with the feeling that