The Demand for an Eight Hours Day.

The one demand of the laboring masses which to-day forces itself on the attention alike of the willing and the unwilling, is the rapidly growing international movement in favor of an Eight Hours Day.

In England and Scotland, in Australia and America, and throughout the Continent of Europe, the wage-earners are quickly coming to be unanimous on this point.

This has come about, not so much from the conviction that the present hours are injurious to health—though that in many cases is the fact—not so much from the theory that shorter hours mean higher wages—though that theory is in the main sound,—but from the strongly-felt desire for additional opportunities for self-cultivation and the enjoyment of life.

Men and women who toil for wages are everywhere growing tired of being only working animals. They wish to enjoy, as well as to labor; to pluck the fruits, as well as dig the soil; to wear as well as to weave. They are eager for opportunity to see more of the great world in which they live—a world of which many of them now for the first time hear from books. On all sides there is an expansion of life. New possibilities of enjoyment, physical, emotional, intellectual, are daily opening for the masses. New aspirations are daily surging up. We need not wonder then that this generation is no longer content to live as its fathers and mothers lived. Hence in all classes the demand for leisure grows keener and keener. Both men and women are growing daily more conscious of the cruelty of a system which condemns them to a barely broken round of monotonous toil. Everywhere they begin fiercely to rebel against this system, and nerve themselves to prepare for its overthrow.

"Work we will," they say in effect, if not in words, "for we know that work is the condition of life. But we demand in return the wage for our work. Not mere money wage—for that by itself is "useless—but the power and opportunity to enjoy the advantages which the labor of all of us has created."