remained until six o'clock the following afternoon, except when eating breakfast and dinner. In either case, they were on duty for a working day of seventeen hours, with no rest period save for meals. Those who worked the second half of the night went home for a hurried breakfast just before

6 a. m.

"The father of the family was apparently an active, hardworking man. He expressed the opinion that night work in addition to day work was rather hard on the children, but said that he was trying to get money to buy a home. No member of this family could read or write."

The government agents found the homes of many night workers as dismal and neglected as similar homes were found by investigators abroad. In several cases when both parents worked on night shifts, the children came to the mill to sleep on boxes and rolls of cotton,-pitiable drifts and strays deprived of anchorage. Or when the mother of a family worked on a night shift and also attended to her home duties, including the weekly washing and ironing, she had to spend "one day at least . . . from 18 to 24 hours without sleeping."

Of the moral degeneration due to night work, the government report on the glass industry gives lurid instances.† Women's work in glass making is confined for the most part to the finishing department and to the lehr-room, where glassware is removed from the lehr or annealing-oven in which it has been slowly cooled after firing. In four factories, however, negro women are employed as substitutes for boys in the furnace rooms. Here, during the night shift and at dawn when work stops, are found at their worst the coarseness and immoralities resulting from the close association at night, of men and women hardened by the most exhausting and hottest labor.

If the character of these poor negro women in the glasshouses be held responsible for the excesses of the night shift and the perils of their lonely return home, what shall be said • Ibid. Vol. I, pp. 289 and 293.

† Ibid. Vol. III. The Glass Industry, p. 177 ff.

of the similar perils and alarms of refined women employed in night restaurants, whose return home at midnight or thereabouts is compulsory? Can there be any doubt that such a necessity is unworthy of any community calling itself civilized?*

Such, then, are some of the documentary evidences, though insufficient and merely suggestive of the existing night work of women. If we turn now to our fragmentary data as to the economic value of night work, it seems also to corroborate European experience. Just as the silk mill owners of the Vosges and Rhône found weaving by artificial light unsatisfactory, so it is beginning to be found in the silk centers of America.† Just as night work was abandoned by many European employers because of its lesser productivity and the decreased efficiency of their workers, so, says a recent publication of the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Commerce and Immigration, night work seems to be generally regarded as a losing proposition.”‡

Cotton mill owners in North Carolina who had voluntarily discontinued night work and were therefore disinterested witnesses, were unanimous in declaring to the government investigators that

"it did not pay. They asserted that, as a rule, they could induce only an inferior class of employes to work on the night shifts, with a constant lowering in the quality of product, while at the same time a higher rate of wages than usual was required to secure even this class of help; that continuous operation resulted in more than ordinary 'wear and tear' on machinery, and that there was a disposition to neglect the care of machinery when used jointly by two shifts. The manager of a mill in Georgia, which had carried on night work for a year and abandoned it, expressed the feeling tersely by saying, 'It was hard on the people and hard on the machinery."" §

*Ibid. Vol. V. Wage-Earning Women in Stores and Factories, p. 75. † Ibid. Vol. IV. The Silk Industry, p. 143.

The Cotton Mills of South Carolina. Published by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Immigration. 1907. § Senate Document No. 645. Op cit., Vol. I, p. 285.

"The indications," says the federal report, "are strong enough to warrant the conclusion that overtime runs to dangerous limits in both mercantile and manufacturing establishments, in the absence of restrictive laws not only setting definitely a limit to the hours of labor per day and per week, but fixing the closing hours."*

The legal closing hour which has been found the only practicable device to check unscrupulous night work, is the most immediate need in our legislation for working women. It must be made an integral part of all laws reducing the length of the workday if they are to be enforceable and if they are to protect the workers in fact as well as in theory.

The special interests are strong enough today to obscure the issues and secure for themselves special license to invert nature's order of life for thousands of working women. Nature's revenges for the infraction of her inviolable law will teach another generation better wisdom, unless reason can in our day prevail over indifference and greed, and restore to wage-earning girls and women the night for sleep.

Senate Document No. 645. Op. cit., Vol. V. Wage-Earning Women in Stores and Factories, p. 215. Italics added.

M

XI

CONCLUSION

ANY persons who have followed our argument to this point may be inclined to resent the predominat

ing rôle assigned to overwork and fatigue. They may contend that this stress on the length of working hours is wholly irrational; that overstrain is altogether too limited a cause to assign for the breakdown of health and efficiency. "The really fundamental basis of health," these critics will say, "is contingent upon the total standard of living. The causes of breakdown cannot be isolated, but lie in the total disabilities of working people. Their dark and unsanitary homes, their overcrowding and lack of privacies, their bad food and unpalatable cooking,-all these things are more important for health than the mere number of hours spent at work. And on the industrial side, probably wages and income have a much more direct relation to health than few hours more or less of work. In curtailing work, therefore," our critic continues, “you are further lessening productivity and income, and so are merely making the struggle for existence harder."

Some conscientious critics go even further than this and contend that leisure is mere temptation to go wrong, when people live in wretched, crowded homes, with only the street and the saloon to satisfy desire. A shortened workday, they say, gives the workers just so much more opportunity for dissipation.

Now it is, in large degree, this point of view on the part of many persons which is responsible for much of the prevalent indifference and ignorance concerning the active injuries of overwork, in industry as it exists today.

In a previous chapter we have dwelt upon the economic fallacy in this criticism, and have shown how output and wages tend to rise rather than fall with shortened working hours, so that income is in the long run increased, not curtailed.

So far as regards temperance and the whole general tone of working communities, we need not rely on theories and speculations. We need only appeal to that body of historical fact to which we have so often turned for light. As a matter of fact, what has been the effect on working people of increased leisure? How have they, on the whole, spent the added hour or hours of freedom from work?

The answer to this question is, indeed, one of the most encouraging chapters in industrial history: the response to opportunity, the rapidity with which working people have learned the uses of leisure. Where cynics prophesied mere drunken idleness and rowdyism, fairer observers found a kind. of regeneration. There was no sudden millennium but whereever sufficient time has elapsed since the establishment of a more humane workday, allowing a wider margin of leisure, the workers have made extraordinary advance in physique and morals. The gradual emergence of the English mill operatives from the physical and moral degeneration into which they had sunk in the thirties of the last century, is not exceptional but typical. It is a humble chronicle, but full of meaning to any reader who loves the fullness of human nature. Gardening, sewing, the out-of-doors on summer evenings, evening schools in winter, time for the "endearing trivialities of home life,"-these were some of the simple, yet enduring things at which mill workers learned to spend their leisure.

Of the benefits accruing from the change, none have been greater than the increase in temperance. Nor is this surprising. No thoughtful observer can seriously ascribe to

See Part II of this volume, pp. 290–317.

† British Sessional Papers, 1847-48, Vol. XXVI, p. 9; 1849, Vol XXII, p. 7; 1850, Vol. XXIII, pp. 48-49; 1868-69, Vol. XIV, p. 83, etc.