before encountering the objection that to restrict the conditions under which a woman may work is to prejudice her industrial interests. The employer, it is said, will prefer a man, who is free to labor as many hours as the situation renders necessary. Some objectors contend, farther, that protective legislation imposing such a handicap on women is class legislation and deprives the female laborer of her inherent rights as wage-earner and as citizen. The right of free contract and immunity from class legislation are among the fundamental privileges of American citizens, and they cannot be regarded as less essential to women than to men; but all individual rights and privileges give way before public necessity. Statutory limitation of the hours of labor has been sustained and enforced in the case of men who are engaged in dangerous trades or in occupations where the public safety depends upon a high degree of efficiency. The law prescribes an eight hour day for miners in eight of our Rocky Mountain States; and, though hotly protested, this legislation has been sustained by the Federal Courts on the ground that a "limitation is necessary for the preservation of the health of the employees." In the opinion on the Utah eight hour law, handed down by the Federal Court, a principle of great significance was enunciated, viz.: "The protection of health and morals is no less important than the protection of life." The prohibition of Sunday labor in barber shops was sustained by the New York courts and by the Fderal Court, to which the question was appealed on even broader grounds. "It is to the interest of the state to have strong, robust, healthy citizens, capable of self-support, of bearing arms, and of adding to the resources of the country. In its decision that the New York ten hour law for bake-shops (1905) was unconstitutional, the Federal Court did not deny the power of the legislature to limit the hours of labor where the effect of long hours on the health of employees and on public health was clearly prejudicial, but over-ruled the judgment of the state legislature and of the state supreme court in this regard. Where long hours have had the effect of diminishing the reliability of the employees of public service corporations, and thereby jeopardizing the safety of their patrons, the legislatures have not hesitated to enact, and the courts to maintain, laws prescribing such limitations as should guard against excessive nervous strain. Rhode Island, for example, limits the working day for street-car employees to ten for each shift. The Congress of the United States has recently legislated on similar lines. Shocked

by a series of railway accidents caused by the exhaustion of signalmen and telegraph operators, the American public demanded protection, and the national legislature prescribed a nine hour shift for all telephone and telegraph operators employed by inter-state railways. In the same act (1907) it was stipulated that no more than sixteen hours of continuous labor be required of train employees, this shift to be followed by a ten hours interval for rest.

Students of labor legislation are convinced that the weight of legal opinion in the United States is shifting from the individualist theories of ante-bellum days to the policy of state regulation, notably where women and children are concerned. These are the laborers most likely to be injured by excessive toil and least likely to be organized for effective resistance. The greater strain involved in the speeding of machinery and in the multiplication of the demands upon brain and nerves necessitates increased safe-guards, so that we may anticipate progressive additions to our labor code, reducing the length of the working day, prohibiting night work and injurious trades to the weaker members of the community, extending the scope of such limitations from factory to mechanical and from mechanical to mercantile establishments. Timid folk call this tendency socialistic, and predict the doom of individual liberty; but the humanitarian sees in it only the instinct of self-preservation, finding expression in new forms suited to the new dangers that threaten modern society. For good or for ill, the principle seems to be clearly established that the body politic has the right to protect itself against the injury that may be wrought in the pursuit of individual interest, whether the menace originate in the cupidity of the employer or in the ignorance or recklessness of the workman. We interfere with the right of free contract where contagion or accident threatens; why hesitate where the life force, the vitality of the nation, is being sapped by excessive labor?

Granted, then, that the state has authority to modify the contract between employer and employed so far as may be necessary to safe-guard its own interests, there may still be ground for apprehension lest the industrial opportunities of women be curtailed by a species of class legislation. Are not women entitled to the same freedom as men in disposing of their labor? In reaching its decision on the constitutionality of the Oregon law, the Supreme Court was guided not so much by abstract theories of individual rights as by considerations of public policy. The problem was primarily one

of physique. Since the average woman has less motor activity and less muscular and nervous endurance than the average man, and since moreover her social function is radically different, a general limitation of the working-day in behalf of women wageearners was, in the opinion of the court, justified on grounds of public policy. Justice Brewer's words voicing the opinion of the court on the Oregon law are explicit: "Legislation for the protection of women may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained." "The limitations which this statute places on her contractual powers, upon her right to agree with her employer as to the time she shall labor, are not imposed solely for her benefit, but also largely for the benefit of all." "Since healthy mothers are essential to vigorous off-spring, the physical well-being of women becomes an object of public interest and care, in order to preserve the health and vigor of the race.'

No one familiar with the conditions under which women labor in the cotton factories of Georgia, or the silk factories of Pennsylvania, or in the laundries or canneries of Oregon and California, can doubt the wisdom of this conclusion. Physical and nervous exhaustion, recurring day after day and week after week, sap the vital forces beyond possibility of recovery. For women, overwork in itself constitutes a dangerous trade. The inevitable consequences are debility, neuresthenia, and physcial collapse. The testimony of physicians and charity workers is conclusive as to the secondary consequences of this nervous breakdown. Accidents can quite often be traced to over-strain. The wearied muscles and tremulous nerves become unequal to guiding the machine, and slackened attention results in disaster. According to the report of the British Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for 1903, the most dangerous hours are those of the greatest fatigue, viz. from eleven to twelve in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon. Many accidents attributed to carelessness are really the effect of overwork, and the sufferer should receive compensation from the employer who exacts the prolonged labor or from the state that permits it. The modern laundry, with its steam-driven machinery, is peculiarly open to this form of abuse. It is, moreover, a seasonal employment of an extreme type. On Mondays and Fridays the work is rushed, and the women are kept in their places far into the evening hours. Fumes from the gas-jets in the ironing room work harm to the head and eyes. The necessity for being constantly on the

feet and the damp over-heated atmosphere of the workrooms engender serious diseases varicose veins, rheumatism, and tuberculosis. Moreover, the physical depression consequent on these working conditions render the laundry-worker peculiarly liable to drunkenness. In England the "beer-man goes his rounds at 10 a. m. and at 6 or 7 p. m., delivering his cans of beer from the nearest public house-an institution which is unknown in any other trade." Statistics for factory towns both in this country and abroad go to show a lower birth-rate and a higher infant mortality among factory operatives than among other classes in the same community. A girl who stands eleven or twelve hours a day, bending over a loom or a mangle, is not preparing for wholesome motherhood. The mother who leaves home at six o'clock in the morning and returns at six or seven in the evening cannot take adequate care of young children. Woman's duty to the state is more important than that "of bearing arms and adding to the resources of the country." Upon her devolves the supreme obligation of nurturing the children, of determining the character of future generations.

To one who has watched untrained women crowding into the occupations open to them and has experienced something of the enormous difficulty of organizing workers who go into a trade with the full expectation of abandoning it upon marriage, defense of the right of free contract seems worse than useless. It is an outworn shibboleth which only serves to blind us to the fact that freedom to negotiate terms of labor is an empty boast under the present conditions of industry. Justice Brewer spoke the humane truth when he said that protective legislation was necessary to secure to women "a real equality of right."

Championship of woman's rights the just claims of women to equal or equivalent education, free access to all employments for which they can fit themselves, and an adequate representation in civil and political affairs-should not blind us to the fundamental necessity of promoting health, intelligence, and righteousness among the women who are forced by industrial competition into exhausting and degrading trades. A right of prime importance, no less essential for women than for children, and of far more practical value than the suffrage, is the right to protection from excessive labor, to exemption from injurious working conditions.

It is both a virtue and a defect of our federal form of government that each state legislature acts for its own constituency as if

No

its particular problem had never been discussed or legislated upon before. The results of experience are generally ignored as inapplicable or misleading. Now, while each new community presents new conditions, human nature remains very much the same. sooner do competitive forces come into play than the strong begin to take advantage of the weak, and business success is won at the expense of the general welfare. It is difficult to convince a community jubilant in the first flush of material prosperity that certain social safe-guards which seem to handicap industry really make for ultimate wealth; but the experience of Old World nations is conclusive in this regard. The British Parliament enacted a ten hour law for women in 1844, France and Switzerland followed this excellent example in 1848, Holland in 1889, Germany in 1891, Austria in 1897, Italy in 1902. The experience of sixty years has set at naught the predictions of the statesmen and economists who protested against this legislation as a menace to national prosperity and to woman's economic future. The consensus of expert opinion cited by Mr. Brandeis goes to show that the shorter working day has brought about no diminution in the ratio of output to employee, while the quality of the product has definitely improved, The women concerned have gained in physique, while they have lost nothing in wage rate. Far from being obliged to surrender their employment to men, the proportion of wage earning women has increased, even in the protected occupations. The employer finds in the comparative cheapness of female employees, in their superior adaptibility, or in their greater docility, sufficient off-set for the legal limitation upon their hours of labor.

California, although included in the list of states that limit the working day for women, occupies a unique position. The state constitution stipulates that "no person shall, on account of sex, be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation, or profession." This provision was incorporated, presumably, for the economic benefit of women; and this supposition is fortified by the fact that we find analogous legislation on the statute books. For example, the Act to prevent discrimination against teachers (of 1874) requires that the same compensation be paid to female as to male teachers for like services, when holding the same grade certificates. In the constitutional convention of 1878-9 an amendment was proposed, but not incorporated, providing that adult women should be eligible for any position in the educational depart