facturing states, such as Alabama and Mississippi in the south, and New Jersey in the north,* set no legal limitation whatsoever upon the hours of women's employment. This is true also of other states, such as Delaware, Kansas, and lowa, where manufacture is not yet foremost but where thousands of women are working overlong hours in laundries, restaurants, and department stores. Indeed, only 15 states have enacted laws to check the overwork of women in the exhausting service of the modern department store; and conspicuous by their absence from among these, are states with large commercial centers, such as Maryland,* New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

Like most human institutions, factory legislation has been founded on no a priori logic. It has been, rather, essentially illogical, the result of half-way measures and opposing forces. During the nineteenth century, while agricultural Europe and America were gradually becoming industrial and the whole face of nature reflected the new order, the history of factory legislation-the state's defense of its workers-has been devious advance and compromise. Selfinterest on the one side, self-defense and philanthropy on the other, hampered by prejudices of every sort,-these for the most part have brought about such protection as exists today. Not man's foresight, but the inexorable results of labor long carried on counter to nature's laws, have been on the whole responsible for the meager protection which industrial communities have granted their workers.

In the main, opposition to laws protecting working women and children has come from the unenlightened employer, who has been blind to his own larger interests and who has always seen in every attempt to protect the workers an interference with business and dividends. To this day, it is the shortsighted

New Jersey, Maryland and Kentucky have enacted ten-hour laws for women as this book goes to press (April, 1912).

California, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. The New York law applies only to girls up to 21 years.

and narrow-minded spirit of money-making that is the most persistent enemy of measures designed to save the workers from exhaustion and to conserve their working capacities. Work itself is of the essence of life; without it, man's physical as well as his moral nature decays. Regular continuous labor and exertion is as necessary for the worker's health as it is for subsistence, and if legislation regulating the workday had sought to invade legitimate work, it would long ago have defeated its own end. What it does seek is to check and control overwork, to conserve the workers from labor which leaves them spent and worn at thirty-five and forty years, when they should be in their prime.

In most European countries, and in some of our states, legislation has usually been preceded by parliamentary commissions and investigations. The testimony of physicians who have practiced among factory populations, and factory inspectors who have been in daily contact with the workers, furnishes an impressive array of opinions and evidence on the practical effects of the long working day.

Thus, for example, when in the first days of factory legislation, almost a century ago, Sadler's Committee sat and learned what the working children of England were suffering, the most impressive testimony was that of the physicians. Many medical men in turn testified to the hideous overwork menacing the health of England. By 1844 Lord Shaftesbury could maintain in Parliament that, since 1816, 80 surgeons and physicians and three medical commissioners speaking for the medical men of Lancashire, had asserted "the prodigious evil of the system."* Buried in musty volumes on remote library shelves, describing cruelties to children now happily long past, these terrible pages of testimony strike at the outset the keynote of factory legislation: the benefit to health and output, to physical and economic life.

Just seventy-five years later, in another continent, another memorable group of physicians presented what is, perhaps, the most impressive medical testimony of the last * Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, March 15, 1844.

quarter century on the subject of overwork. This was in the controversy between the Bell Telephone Company of Toronto, Canada, and their girl employes, concerning a species of industrial strain unknown to the early nineteenth century, typical of almost incredible changes wrought in less than three generations. Twenty-six prominent Toronto physicians and neurologists described the injuries accruing to young women in the exhausting telephone service, and laid down what seemed to them minimum requirements for health and efficiency.*

The testimony of physicians, of which these are the earliest and latest examples, and the long files of factory inspectors' reports, repeat in country after country, in historical sequence, similar experiences: the same enthusiasm for industrial expansion with indiscriminate employment of old and young; the same exploitation, the same suffering, and the same need of protection. Conditions and industrial processes differ, different trades are described, different people discussed, but, unknown to one another, and terrible in their unconscious unanimity, these observers ring the changes upon the common human facts at issue-exhaustion and deterioration following in the wake of the long working day and working night. Workers of many nations pass before one as one reads; men, women, and young children drawn into the industrial whirlpool, as the wave of invention and development strikes their respective countries,-and protection follows slowly after.

Thus, England stood first in industry at the close of the eighteenth century. By the time one generation had grown up under the new régime, the evils of exploitation called irresistibly for some check, and the first general act in protection of working children-feeble precursor of a long sequence -was passed in 1833. France, the next to enter the industrial race, began to legislate for the workers in the late

Report of the Royal Commission on a Dispute Respecting Hours of Employment, between the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd., and Operators at Toronto, Ontario. Ottawa, 1907.

forties, Switzerland following in the seventies, Austria, Holland, and Germany in the next two decades, Italy at the close of the century. Similarly in our own country, Massachusetts and the other New England states where the first cotton mills were operated, were the first to find that legislative protection must shield the workers to conserve them.

First the new industry, then exploitation, then the demand for some measure of protection-such is the universal story. Nor is this a chance sequence. It is the relentless record of history, the more impressive for its unconscious testimony to a waste of human effort and experience, in retrospect scarcely credible among a thinking people, yet in our very midst persisting steadily to this day.

S

TRIKING as is the unanimity of the world's indus

trial experience and the testimony of observers in each

country as to the need of more complete protection for the workers, such empirical data furnish, after all, no scientific basis for labor legislation. They are arguments, legitimate presumptions in its favor, not scientific proof.

Yet a scientific ground for such legislation does exist and is available today. The fundamental basis for laws regulating the working hours of men, women, or children in industrial occupations-at the spindle or loom, in machine shops or laundries, behind the counter or in the glass-houses -is the common physiological phenomenon, fatigue, the normal result of all human action. For fatigue is nature's warning signal that the limit of activity is approaching. Exhaustion, or overfatigue, follows when the warning is disregarded and the organism is pushed beyond its limits by further forced exertions.

In this inexorable sequence, subject to countless variations but never failing, we have a broad fundamental basis for the short working day in industry: a physiological necessity inherent in man's structure for allowing an adequate margin of rest. The regulation of working hours is the necessary mechanism to prevent overfatigue or exhaustion, forerunner of countless miseries to individuals and whole nations.

It is precisely in explaining the normal and abnormal aspects of fatigue, its nature, effects, and relation to all human life, that science can give its authoritative sanction to labor legislation. For, during the last century, unknown to those who saw the practical results of overwork in industry and