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The Green Bag

the employment hours of women in laundries. The Supreme Court of Ore gon had affirmed a conviction under such a statute, Mutter v. Oregon (48 Oreg. 452; 85 Pac. 855), and the United States Supreme Court sustained the decision (208 U. S. 412). There had been some decisions of state courts against the validity of such statutes, notably Ritchie v. People, 155 Illinois 98, 40 N. E. Rep. 454, 29 L. R. A. 79. On the argument of the Oregon case in the Supreme Court the results of in vestigations made in many countries with regard to the effect of long hours of work upon the health of women were presented to the court and American and foreign statutes with extracts from over ninety reports of commissioners and inspectors were submitted with the brief and are referred to in the opinion. Mr. Justice Brewer, who dissented in Holden v. Hardy, read the opinion of the court, and while reaffirming the general rule that the right to contract is a part of the liberty of the individual guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amend ment, he said this liberty might be restricted in many ways by a state with out conflicting with the provisions of the amendment, and it was held that because of woman's physical structure and her maternal function, and having in view not merely her own health but also the wellbeing of the race, the legislature might well be justified in restricting her power to contract with respect to industrial labor, and the conclusion was that a statute limiting her work in laundries to ten hours a day should be sustained. After this even stronger pressure of fact and argument was brought to bear upon the Supreme Court of Illinois, which had in 1895 vigorously condemned a statute restricting the work of women in laundries to eight hours a day. The

results of the investigation made by Miss Josephine Goldmark in the Oregon case were presented in the briefs and arguments of counsel W. C. Calhoun and Louis D. Brandeis, and upon the facts and arguments so presented the Supreme Court of Illinois refused to be bound by its former decision, and held that the limitation of women's work in mechanical establishments to ten hours a day was not an arbitrary or unreason able limitation upon women's liberty of contract. The case was W. C. Ritchie Co. v. Wayman, 244 Ill. 509; 91 N. E. Rep. 695. In these decisions the question was whether there were special conditions by reason of which the legislation limit ing the hours of labor could fairly be said to have been an exercise of the police power for the protection of public health, safety, or morals, and whether there was anything peculiar in the condition of the mine or of the bakery or in the position of women to justify special regulations affecting lib erty of contract. Any general control of the right of a man to work was em phatically denied, and the courts have firmly maintained that in the absence of special and peculiar conditions legisla tion limiting the freedom of grown men with respect to their hours of labor is unconstitutional. It is, however, strongly urged on behalf of the labor unions that modern industrial conditions make it reasonable that the hours of labor even of fullgrown men when they are working for wages in manufacturing and similar establishments should be subject to limitation for the purpose of protecting them against overwork and underpay. There is a feeling openly expressed that in this and other instances the courts are permitting the industrial oppression of the people under the guise of the pro_