The importance from a theoretic point of view of a distinction between the maximum working-day and the normal working-day would of itself have justified our dwelling on the foregoing details. But these details are also of practical importance in considering the policy of the ten hours day of Labour Protection, as against the legal eight hours day. One word more on this point: _the eight hours day threatens to ultimately develope, should Socialism as an experiment ever be tried, into a normal working-day of the worst possible kind_. Democratic Socialism has, hitherto at least, adopted on its party programme no formulary of the normal working-day required by it. It will scarcely find a better formulary than that of _Rodbertus_ (omitting the periodical re-adjustment of the whole share of Labour as against Capital, see pp. 123, 124). The normal measure of _Rodbertus_ would be an incomparably superior method to that of regarding as equal all astronomic labour time without respect to differences in the arduousness of the labour in the various trades, no attempt being made to determine the unit of normal work per normal time-day or normal time-hour. But would Democratic Socialism have really any other course open to it than to treat all labour time as equal, and so to bring about the adoption of a socialistic normal time of the most disastrous type, viz. the submergence of the _socially normal working-day_ in the _general maximum working-day_? To the enormous difficulties, technical and administrative, inherent in the normal labour time of Rodbertus, would inevitably be added the special and aggravated difficulties arising from the overpowering influence of the masses under a democratic "Social State," on the regulation of normal time. Social Democracy, as a democracy, would almost necessarily be forced to concede the most extreme demands for equality, _i.e._ the claim that the labour hour of every workman should be treated as equal to that of every other workman, without regard to degrees of severity, without regard to differences of kind, and without regard to degrees of individual capacity and the fluctuations of value in use. In any case the Social State would probably not dare to emphasize in the face of the masses the extraordinary differences of normal labour in astronomically equal labour time, _i.e._ it might not venture to assign different rewards to equal labour times on account of differences in the labour. And yet if it failed to recognise those differences Social Democracy would be doomed from the outset. It can thus be easily understood why Social Democracy has hitherto evaded her own peculiar task of precisely determining a practicable, socialistic, normal working-day.