Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/45

 SUPREME COURT AND THE UTAH EIGHT-HOURS' LAW 29

State that the public health should be preserved as that life should be made secure. With this 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 instruction of the blind established ; and especial 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. Thus in the case of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company (120 Mass., 283) it was held that a statute prohibiting the employment. of all persons under eighteen, and of all women, in any manufacturing establishment more than sixty hours per week violates no contract of the commonwealth implied in the granting of a charter to a manufacturing company, nor any right reserved under the constitution to any individual citizen, and may be maintained as a health or police regulation."

It is refreshing to find the valuable Massachusetts decision thus authoritatively brought back into the " current of authority " from which it was, as we have seen, thrust forth by the lUincis court in its now overruled decision of 1895 '" the case of Ritchie vs. the People.

The court also settled the vital question : Who shall decide which occupations are sufficiently injurious to justify the restriction of the hours of daily labor of persons employed in them ? On no point have state courts been more arro- gant, the Illinois court taking, perhaps, the most extreme posi- tion of all in the following passage of its decision (Ritchie z'j. the People): "It (the eight-hour section of the factory law) does not inhibit their (women's) employment in factories or workshops. On the contrary, it recognizes such places as proper for them to work in by permitting their labor therein during eight hours of each day. The question here is not whether a particular employment is a proper one for the use of female labor, but the question is whether, in an employment which is conceded to be lawful in itself and suitable for woman to be