In 1856, R. W. Emerson concluded that while an Englishman might eat and drink ‘not much more than another man’ he laboured three times as much: everything in England ‘is at a quick pace. They have reinforced their own productivity, by the creation of that marvellous machinery which differences this age from every other age.’ Fifty years later such a view was not the predominant one. If anything, conventional opinion held the reverse to be true: Englishmen laboured less hard than others; they were ill-adapted to even more marvellous machinery; their work irritated them; ingenious Americans and docile Germans passed them on all sides. The argument that industrial life and division of labour had become intolerably monotonous to many workers was, of course, a commonplace of the nineteenth century. When Marx wrote that ‘the worker feels himself at home outside his work and feels absent from himself in his work’ there were few who would not have conceded that he was at least partly right. By the end of the nineteenth century, when the British economy appeared to flag, it came to be argued not only that boredom demoralized the worker but that it also damaged the economy by undermining his efficiency. Thereafter it was implied in the reports of royal commissions, departmental committees of enquiry and delegations of concerned persons. It was, of course, argued explicitly as well, both by employers and by workers themselves.