3o8 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

strained by the exigencies of arduous professions to exchange the time-
table of the common run of Man and Beast for the time-table of foxes,
owls, and bats by working at night and sleeping in the day-time, these
night-workers, no less than other people, conform to the astronomical
rhythm of the Day-and-Night Cycle in their own topsy-turvy way; they
merely turn inside out the ordinary human way of keeping in step with
the planet's periodic rotation round its own axis. As for the majority of
Mankind who sleep by night and wake by day, you can see them keeping
time with the alternations of light and darkness in country life and in
city life alike. The Moreot peasant who comes down every morning from
his village on the crag to his field in the plain, and climbs up again every
evening from the kambos to the kastro, is dancing to the same astrono-
mical tune—played by the Earth's rotatory rhythm—as the New York
business man who commutes between New Canaan and Manhattan or
the New Yorker's Constantinopolitan confrere who makes the shorter
daily 'round trip' between Asia and Europe.1 All the same, by the
writer's day, Man in Process of Civilization had contrived to break the
chains even of this physiologically imperative Day-and-Night Cycle.
He had extricated himself from his servitude to this particular law of
Physical Nature by inventing the double shift. An organizational device
that was being practised already in a post-Minoan heroic age by Laestry-
gonian herdsmen, who had tumbled to it thanks to living far enough
north to know summer days that ran into one another without any inter-
vening nights,3 had been adopted before the writer's day in all latitudes
by the navigators of the high seas and by the industrial workers on the
terra firma of a Westernizing planet. By this trick of putting Mycerinus3
into commission, the scientific managers of a latter-day Western in-
dustry had translated an Egyptiac fairy tale into a prosaic reality.4

Another astronomical cycle to which Man had been a slave was the
Annual Cycle of the Seasons; and, though this Surnmer-and-Winter
Cycle did not impinge upon Man directly, as the Day-and-Night Cycle
did, by communicating its rhythm to the human body's physiological
demands, it had exercised a hardly less potent indirect dominion over
Man's life through its direct dominion over a physical environment out
of which Man had to wring his livelihood and, beyond that, to gather a sur-
plus, above the minimuna required for bare subsistence, to spend on war

Mankind are awake and in the running to gain a hearing for their prayers at odd
moments of their working day. Yes, thanks to the endowments bequeathed to us by
pious benefactors, we monks do find ourselves in a decidedly advantageous position.*

1 In this comparison the relevant point for our present purpose is the regulation of
the rural and the urban worker's daily round alike by the cyclic motion of the Earth's
night-and-day clock. It is true, of course, that the journey which these two kinds of
workers make, in one direction every morning and in the reverse direction every evening,
is forced upon them by diverse considerations. The peasant is moved to commute by
the insecurity of his field of work, the business man by its congestion; but this diversity
of motive for an identical daily shuttling movement is irrelevant to our present incruiry.

* See Odyssey, Book X, 11. 81-86.

3 The tale of Mycerinus is told by Herodotus in Book II, chap. 133.

+ The successive shifts of hands, through which a latter-day Western plant was kept
in operation for twenty-four hours in the day, had been anticipated in the successive
watches through which a ship had been enabled to hold on her course for twenty-four
hours in the day without having to be beached each night in order to allow the crew to
sleep ashore.