If it were our purpose to elaborate a real system of psychological economics, we should have to proceed here to a careful study of the influences of fatigue on the industrial achievement.  We should have to discuss the various kinds of fatigue and exhaustion, the conditions of restoration, and the whole group of related problems of psychophysics.  But this is the one field which has been thoroughly ploughed over by science and by practical life in the course of the last decades.  No new suggestion and no new hint of the importance of the problem is needed here.  Our short discussion was planned to be confined to those regions which have not been worked up in systematic investigations and for which new devices seemed desirable.  Hence we do not reproduce here the rich material of facts which the physiologists and psychophysicists have brought together in the last half-century, the importance of which for industrial labor is perfectly evident.  Moreover, the practical applications and the insight into the social needs have transformed the factories themselves into one big laboratory in which the problem of fatigue has been studied by practical experiments.  The problem of the dependence of fatigue and 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