How Fatigue Will Poison You
By Ida M. Tarbell
MEN and women come in the morning to their tasks with a spring of fresh energy within them. Little by little during the hours of labor they empty that spring. When it is dry, they must draw from forces which should be untouched. By some strange chemistry which no one understands too well, these intrusions on the physical forces which should be inviolate, produce in the human system a true toxic condition—fatigue poison, autopoison the scientists call it. If this fatigue poison passes a point where the period of rest following is not equal to the task of throwing it off, and filling afresh the spring of energy, the man goes back to his toil a little unfit; the longer he goes on, the more unfit he becomes. Slowly the poison invades his system. The repairing forces—food, relaxation, pleasures, and sleep—become less and less equal to the task. The man becomes more and more open to the attack of disease; less and less able to do his work; unfit to improve upon it; unable to grow. He is an unsafe man, too, one not to be trusted among machines in dangerous places. The man has been poisoned into unfitness by the slow accumulation of fatigue poison which he could not throw off. It was not work which did this. It was too much work. He needed the work to keep him fit. Without it or its equivalent, a regular physical exercise, his spring of energy would have as surely deteriorated as it did from overwork. The spring of energy standing idle would have soured within him. It has taken years of observation and experiment to establish with anything like scientific accuracy the baneful effects on the laborer and his product of the too-long day. This has been done finally with a completeness which even the courts are recognizing. Moreover, in establishing these facts, there have been discoveries made of the effects of the shorter day which have been as heartening as they have been surprising. They are discoveries which upset all the old theories about hours. Briefly put, they amount to this: An eight-hour day in a well-managed shop yields as large a quantity of work as a ten-hour day, and cuts out almost entirely certain irritations and interruptions which always have characterized the longer work period. As for labor, it has become an axiom in its circle that “shortening the day increases the pay.” There is many a manufacturer that will tell you that shortening the day increases the profits.—Ida M. Tarbell, in the American Magazine.