Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/39

 SUPREME COURT AND THE UTAH EIGHT-HOURS- LAW 23

of employes to their work, much of the present epoch-making federal decision might seem to be mere truism. Under existing decisions, however, it offers the curious and instructive spectacle of the federal supreme court assigning to the states duties and powers which the supreme courts of those states have declared not to be theirs.

In 1895 the supreme court of Illinois decided that the state cannot restrict by legislation the hours of labor of any adult. About the same time the legislature of Colorado inquired of the Colorado supreme court whether a proposed statute limiting to eight hours the working day of laborers and mechanics would be constitutional ; or whether it could be rendered constitutional by an amendment providing that it should apply only to mines and factories. The supreme court of Colorado replied that both proposals "would be unconstitutional, because they violate the rights of parties to make their own contracts — a right guaranteed by our bill of rights and protected by the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States." In 1894 the Nebraska supreme court had decided that " an act of the legislature of that state providing that eight hours should con- stitute a legal day's work for all classes of mechanics, servants, and laborers throughout the state, excepting those engaged in farm and domestic labor, and making violation of its provisions a misdemeanor, was unconstitutional and, therefore, void, both as special legislation and as attempting to prevent persons, legally competent to enter into contracts, from making their own contracts." Of these decisions and opinions so careful a writer as Mr. F. J. Stimson said, no longer ago than the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly: " These decisions have undoubtedly given the quietus in t he United States to any attempt to limit generally the time that a grown man may labor."

In our report as factory inspectors, for 1895, ^^ referred to the Illinois decision in the following terms : "The new feature introduced into the body of American legislative precedent by this decision is the court's assumption that it is not exclusively a matter of the constitution of Illinois. The state constitution could be altered, by a constitutional convention, so that the