value of such an investigation would be cumulative, if it could prove, after a series of years, by large numbers of individual and well authenticated cases, the important part played by overstrain in the production of disease and illhealth among wage-earners.*

Such case study of wage-earners who have succumbed to illness has a marked advantage over the more general study of wage-earners at work. What we seek to know is precisely what is implied in the Italian phrase "the pathology of labor." Just as in medicine the study of pathology goes hand in hand with the study of physiology-the morbid as well as the normal reactions often yielding most suggestive clues—so in industry, not only the physiological but the pathological aspects must be scrutinized: the infections, anæmias, nervous disorders, pelvic derangements in women, and the rest.

It is, in the last resort, those who succumb who must determine the dangerousness of any trade. Thus, for instance, many men no doubt can and do work in caissons, without contracting the dreaded "bends." Yet the legislation which prescribes special rules of hygiene for caisson work is based on the victims, not the survivors. Hence it is essential to learn from a scientific observation of the victims of industry -possibly in hospitals and clinics as suggested above-those unhealthful and dangerous processes of industry which lead to physical disaster.

The beginnings of such an investigation into the trade history as well as the home life of clinic patients is related in the last report of the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital (Jan. 1, 1911Jan. 1, 1912). Eighty working girls who had applied for medical relief during eight months, were studied.

V

ECONOMIC ASPECT OF REGULATION: FATIGUE AND OUTPUT

I`

IN the previous chapters we have found in the laws of fatigue a scientific basis for legislation, and an explanation

of the effects of overwork on health. We may proceed now to seek in the same physiological laws an explanation of the effects of overwork on output and production. To understand the economic as well as the physical effects of regulation, we must turn back to those physiological truths on which both alike are based.

We have sought to bridge the gap between laboratory and factory, and to show how work, whether it be the leg jerk of the frog in scientific experiments, or the contractions of our human muscles in industrial processes, results in chemical reactions within the workers' tissues. Now we must turn from the person of the worker to his accomplishment, from study of the performer to a scrutiny of his performance.

Just as the methods of the laboratory have yielded suggestive analogies in estimating the subjective fatigue of the worker, so they help to estimate the objective value of work accomplished. The diagrams, or curves of work, recorded upon the sooty drum at the laboratory, represent not exactly but symbolically the fluctuations of what is known in industry as output, or production. They explain why long and late hours of labor must physiologically result in lessened output

This is the more important because regulation of the length of working hours has been so bitterly contested by those who feared that any lessening of the hours of labor meant a corresponding economic loss. From the first dawn.

of protective legislation in England over a century ago to the present day, the rallying cry for the most diverse-minded opponents of legislation has been the threatened ruin of industry and manufactures. Solemn or hysterical, an honest conviction, hypocritical, pseudo-scientific, this cry has been more or less successfully invoked in every country, at every attempted advance, bringing with it all the rancors and bitternesses through which the cause of legislation has been dragged. Yet the unconscious consensus of testimony from various states and countries on the economic benefits of the short day, recorded in official and unofficial documents, is in its turn as impressive as we found the unanimity of Levidence on the physical effects of the long day.

For the most part, however, all this body of information is ignored and allowed to fade into the limbo of forgotten things, in our practical efforts at legislation. We must keep reiterating that the unsolved questions and difficulties are of fundamentally the same general character today as in the past. Practically the world over, the state of the sweated trades in 1912 is "closely parallel to that of the Lancashire cotton mills in 1802." To come nearer home, factory legislation in Pennsylvania, New York, and other American states has not yet reached the stage of British textile legislation of more than sixty years ago. And most significant of all, it is still the cry that industry will be ruined by protecting the workers, which most hampers our advance.

It is the cotton lobby which throws its great influence against the workers in the cotton states, the glass lobby in the glass states, the laundrymen's association wherever legislation for laundry workers is proposed, the retail dealers' association against any relief for shop girls. Individual employers, it goes without saying, are humane and enlightened, but their official organizations and representatives have won a sinister distinction in opposing labor legislation. Such associations of employers as those named above, are found officially in the field at every session of the state legislatures. It was, for instance, the Illinois Manufacturers' Association

which officially combatted any restriction whatsoever of women's hours in Illinois, and, failing to defeat the passage of the ten-hour law in 1909, bent all their energies to have the law annulled by the courts. It was the laundrymen's associations which played the same part in Oregon in 1907, and even carried a case against the Oregon ten-hour law to the United States Supreme Court. It is the Retail Dry Goods Merchants Association of New York City which by varied means has succeeded in stifling all limitation of hours for adult women employed in department stores. It was the official Manufacturers' Association of Colorado which issued a statement to the legislature in 1911, pointing out the dangers of the proposed eight-hour law, and denying its need by recounting the contributions of Colorado manufacturers to various charities. The universal argument which has so often crowned their official efforts with success is the abject moneymakers' plea, the fear of loss-"Save us lest we perish."

As the authors of the standard history of factory legislation have said, writing with what Mr. Sidney Webb calls "commendable restraint," as "historical students":*

"In the beginning, the proposal to restrict children to a working day about 30 per cent longer than strong men now think good for themselves, was greeted almost hysterically, and the ruin of trade and commercial collapse of the country were freely prophesied as the necessary result. Inquiry after inquiry, commission after commission, have demonstrated the groundlessness of these rather unmanly terrors, yet the Factory Code is still the barest minimum and scarcely ever is there a discussion in Parliament on the subject that does not reveal that the masses of information and material that exist for the full economic justification of further measures are practically unknown to all but a select few of our legislators."

1. GENERAL EXPERIENCE IN ENGLAND

As far as our immediate subject is concerned,-the relation between fatigue and output,-the testimony of history Hutchins, B. L., and Harrison, A.: History of Factory Legislation, D 253 London P S. King and Son, 1903.

is continuous and impressive. In England, for instance, whose industrial experience is longest and most fully recorded, the cry that legislation would ruin the country united men of the most scattered beliefs and parties to oppose the Ten Hours Movement. The long file of Parliamentary Debates from 1832 onward gives vivid glimpses of the conflict that raged, while industrialism was bursting into life, after the long European wars. The Napoleonic bogie had been laid. The ports of Europe were open again to British commerce. Watt's steam engine, patented in 1769, had advanced into general use. The day of industrialism had come. Terrible as is some of the testimony in the Debates, showing the ugly domination of men's humaner instincts by greed, and the almost intolerable slowness with which nineteenth century empiricism treated each separate abuse as a single issue, unrelated to any general principles of protection, yet these debates are seldom remote or academic. They are Lvivid cross-sections of British history, pulsing with life.

We see the Earl of Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, standard-bearer of the cause, in the great debate of 1844 stung from the lofty tone habitual to him in combatting oppression. Once too often his opponents had flung the foolish taunt that he was attacking commercial interests merely as the representative of a different social class, a taunt not unknown to reformers today. "Most solemnly do I deny the charge," began Lord Ashley, and breaking into anger:

"If you think me wicked enough, do you think me fool enough for such a hateful policy? Can any man in his senses now hesitate to believe that the permanent prosperity of the manufacturing body... is essential, not only to the welfare, but absolutely to the existence of the British Empire?"

We see Bright and Hume and Cobden, leaders of the Manchester School, opposing what they called the "interference" of the government (a still familiar cry!) as certain to bring ruin upon manufacture. These men were fighting, * Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, Mar. 15, 1844.