undertakings of the United States in the arid regions sufficiently illustrate the rapidly increasing scope of these contracts.

Although Congress is far behind the governments of England and Canada in guaranteeing to its indirect employees, working for it through contractors, the same leisure which it has long granted to its direct employees, the states and cities are going rapidly forward and the Supreme Court of the United States, in October, 1903, in the case of Atkins vs. the People, sustained the right of a state to provide by statute for the working day of eight hours for employees of the state itself, and of counties and municipalities within its borders, whether the work be done directly, or indirectly through contractors.

When a majority of the states, acting under this decision, have adopted statutes providing for the working day of eight hours for employees working for the public indirectly through contractors, it is reasonable to suppose that Congress will enact the bill which for many years has been presented to it at every session, providing for similar protection for workingmen in the employ of contractors working for the federal government.

The Right to Leisure of Wage-Earning Women and Children. While striving to establish for themselves the right to daily leisure by trade agreements and by statutes, the wage-earning voters have never relaxed their efforts to establish the same right for women and children in the employ of private individuals and corporations. And in this

effort they have found it easier to use legislative methods, because the courts have been, on the whole, more inclined to permit the exercise of the police power of the legislatures than in the case of adult

men.

Statutes restricting the hours of labor of women and children, while enacted in the interest of health and morality, have often been urged by persons animated by two other motives as well. In many cases, men who saw their own occupations threatened by unwelcome competitors, demanded restrictions upon the hours of work of those competitors for the purpose of rendering women less desirable as employees. In other cases, men who wished reduced hours of work for themselves, which the courts denied them, obtained the desired statutory reduction by the indirect method of restrictions upon the hours of labor of the women and children whose work interlocked with their own. But whatever the motive of the enactment, the real gain has always been leisure for all concerned; and the advantages to employers derivable from the work of women and children have regularly outweighed any inconvenience arising from the shortened working week.

Before 1889 the effort for the enactment of statutes regulating the hours of labor of women was confined to the trade unions, who had struggles of their own, to protect their own interests, and who can scarcely be blamed if they fought the battles for leisure for women and children first and most effectively in fields of industry where they them

selves reaped rewards from their occasional successes, i. e., in occupations in which the work of women and children interlocked with their own.

The sum total of progress made is deplorably slight. While the hours of labor of children under the age of sixteen years are restricted to eight in one day and forty-eight in one week in Utah, Colorado, Montana, Illinois and Vermont; to nine in one day and fifty-four in one week in New York and Delaware and to ten in one day and fifty-five in one week in New Jersey; yet for girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four years whose numbers are increasing more rapidly than any other part of the working class, there are neither effective trade agreements nor laws prescribing anything more advanced than the working-day of ten hours and the working-week of fifty-eight or sixty hours. Moreover, the existing inadequate statutes tend to laxity of enforcement and to exceptions so important as to nullify the intent of the law in many

cases.

Obviously most progress in establishing the right to leisure has been made by men who are both skilled workers and also voters (printers in the government offices, etc.), and the least progress by children ten years old in Georgia and Mississippi. We commonly assume that, under the processes of evolution, industrial conditions improve from decade to decade. But in the matter of a wholesome distribution of free time, it is clear that gains have been made, hitherto, according to the power of the working people to assert their right. How else

can we account for the fact that children of ten years of age still work eleven hours a day in the cotton mills of Georgia? The reason for their overwork is obviously to be sought in their powerlessness to organize for their own defense, in the weakness of the organizations of men in industries in which women and children compete, as they do in the textile trades; and in that apathy of public opinion which permits stockholders living in states in which relatively humane conditions have long prevailed, to derive incomes from corporations in states in which children and young girls are still exploited without restriction.

Leisure never comes to young girls and children employed in manufacture and commerce through efforts of their own, or upon the initiative of their employers, because under the demand for dividends and the pressure of competition, the better employer is constrained by the meaner or the industrially weaker. On a large scale this is illustrated by the alleged present inability of manufacturers in Massachusetts to shorten the working day and the working week in the textile trades, by reason of the pressure of their Southern competitors. For the younger workers, therefore, leisure is gained, with no help from themselves, either because their work interlocks with that of men working under trade agreements; or because statutes have been enacted for their benefit and the organization of men in their trade is powerful and intelligent enough to obtain effective enforcement of the laws; or because there is intervention on behalf of the young employees by

philanthropic bodies, such as the Consumers' League and the various child-labor committees and working-women's societies, through which the public at large intervene in the interest of health and morality.

Taken altogether, the progress made on behalf of women and children, so slight, and so diverse in the different states, indicates how discouragingly far the right to leisure still is from any universal recognition, and how dependent upon militant action of the workers themselves.

It was not until after 1870 that Massachusetts, the Commonwealth which for thirty years stood in advance of all the states of the Republic in safeguarding the health, welfare and rights of wageearning women and children, enacted a statute prohibiting the employment of women and children in manufacture longer than ten hours in one day and sixty hours in one week, and made provision for inspectors to enforce the law. In 1876 this statute was pronounced constitutional by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in the case of the People vs. the Hamilton Manufacturing Company (120 Mass., 385, 1876), in which it was held that the legislature had full power to restrict by statute the hours of labor of adult women employed in factories, under the terms of Chapter II, Section iv, of the constitution of Massachusetts: "Full power and authority are hereby given to the said General Court, from time to time, to make, ordain and establish all manner of wholesome and reasonable laws, ordinances, statutes, directions, and instructions, either with or