184 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

America. But it has taken a new form. When
I was there in 1929, at the height of the boom,
the question was already being ventilated. But
the leisure people were then talking about was
the leisure that results from assured prosperity,
the leisure of a community where poverty has been
abolished and everybody has plenty of money
resulting from highly paid work and plenty of time
to spend it in—in other words the leisure of the
well-to-do. This, though difficult enough^ was
simple compared with what was to follow.
Enormously more difficult is the problem of
dealing with a state of society, in which, owing
to the economies of time and energy effected by
machinery, the proportions of labour and leisure
seem likely to be reversed, labour becoming the
short part of life and leisure the long—a change
in the social structure to which the ever-increasing
unemployment seemed to point. . Under these
conditions the centre of the social problem shifts
from the labour field to the leisure field, and
instead of asking as before " How shall we
spend our leisure so as to have the best effects
on our labour," we now ask rather " What forms
of labour are most conducive to the interests of
leisure ? " In other words, if, as high authorities
predict, the effect of machinery were to reduce
the average working time to five days a week
and four or five hours a day, leaving all the
remaining time for the community to do what
it liked with, it seems pretty clear that the fate