This was the trend which I usually found. In some large machine works I sought for a long time before I found the type of labor which seemed to me the most monotonous. I finally settled on a man who was feeding an automatic machine which was cutting holes in metal strips and who simply had to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip did not reach exactly the right place, he could stop the automatic machine by a lever. He made about 34,000 uniform movements daily and had been doing that for the past 14 years. But he gave me the same account, that the work was interesting and stimulating, while he himself made the impression of an intelligent workingman. At the beginning, he reported, the work had sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later he began to like it more and more. I imagined that this meant that at first he had to do the work with full attention and that the complex movement had slowly become automatic, allowing him to perform it like a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts to other things. But he explained to me in full detail that this was not the case, that he still feels obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work at hand, and that he is able only under these conditions to bring in the daily wage which he needs for his family, as he is paid for every thousand holes. But he added especially that it is not only the wage which satisfies him, but that he takes decided pleasure in the activity itself. On the other hand, I not seldom found wage-earners, both men and women, who seemed to have really interesting and varied activities and who nevertheless complained bitterly over the monotonous, tiresome factory labor. I became more and more convinced that the feeling of monotony depends much less upon the particular kind of work than upon the special disposition of the individual. It cannot be denied that the same contrast exists in the higher classes of work. We find school-teachers who constantly complain that it is intolerably monotonous to go on teaching immature children the rudiments of knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the same task before them are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in the classroom. We find physicians who complain that one case in their practice is like another, and judges who despair because they always have to deal with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition as such is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who feel it a torture to play the same rôle every evening for several weeks, and there are actors who, as one of the most famous actresses assured me after the four hundredth performance of her star rôle, repeat their parts many hundred times with undiminished interest, because they feel that they are always speaking to new audiences. It seems not impossible that this individual difference might be connected with deeper-lying psychophysical conditions.