Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/339

 THE NECESSARY SEQUEL OF CHILD-LABOR LAWS 323

protection of the lives of its citizens, it is difficult to see why precautions may not also be adopted for the protection of their health and morals. It is as much for the interest of the state that the public health should be preserved as that life should be made secure. With this end in view, quarantine laws have been enacted in most, if not all, of the states; insane asylums, public hospitals, and institutions for the care and education of the blind established; and special measures taken for the exclusion of infected cattle, rags, and decayed fruit. In other states laws have been enacted limiting the hours during which women and children shall be employed in factories ; and while their constitutionality, at least as applied to women, has been doubted in some of the states, they have been generally upheld.

Again :

But the fact that both parties are of full age, and competent to contract, does not necessarily deprive the state of the power to interfere, where the parties do not stand upon an equality, or where the public health demands that one party to the contract shall be protected against himself. The state still retains an interest in his welfare, however reckless he may be. The whole is no greater than the sum of all the parts, and when the individual health, safety, and welfare are sacrificed or neglected, the state must suffer.

The court concludes in detail :,

We concur in the following observations of the Supreme Court of Utah in this connection : " It may be said that labor in such conditions must be performed. Granting that, the period of labor each day should be of reason- able length. Twelve hours per day would be less injurious than fourteen, ten than twelve, and eight than ten. The legislature has named eight. Such a period was deemed reasonable."

The latest decision of the Supreme Court upon the restriction of the hours of labor (Re Lochner vs. New York, April, 1905) may, at a superficial view, seem a partial reversal of this important decision. The ten-hour law for bakers in New York is held unconstitutional. But the fact that four of the justices of the court dissented indicates how much difference of opinion existed within the court itself. The majority held that the proposed "health law" was arbitrary and unreasonable in attempting 1 to regulate the hours of labor " in a private business, not dangerous in any degree to morals, or in any real or substantial degree to the health of the employees," and therefore violated the Four- teenth Amendment to the federal Constitution. Justice Harlan, however, said :