ich we have
above described as the ethical force, would seem to sustain them. The
truth is probably that the legislature must be the sole judge of the
expediency of such legislation; where the court can see that it does
bear a direct relation to the morals of the young women concerned,
or the morals of the general community, it will be sustained as
constitutional under the police power, although to that extent
interfering with the personal liberty of women and with their means of
getting a livelihood.

[Footnote 1: Georgia and South Carolina have such law requiring
sixty-six and sixty hours a week respectively in cotton and woollen
manufacturing; but their constitutionality has never been tested. For
_public_ work, see below.]

[Footnote 2: Commonwealth _v._ Hamilton Manufacturing Co. 120 Mass.
383.]

[Footnote 3: Muller _v._ Oregon, 208 U.S. 412. So in Pennsylvania:
Commonwealth _v._ Beatty, 23 Penn. C.C. 300.]

[Footnote 4: People _v._ Williams, 81 N.E. 778.]

[Footnote 5: Bucher _v._ People, 93 Pac. 14.]

As to children there is, of course, no question. Laws limiting their
labor are perfectly constitutional, and some child-labor laws exist
already in all States and Territories except Nevada. The only dispute
on the child-labor question is whether such legislation should be
Federal, or rather whether the Constitution should be so amended as to
make Federal legislation possible. Practically this would meet with
a very much wider opposition than is commonly supposed. The writer,
acting as chairman of the National Conference of Commissioners on
Uniformity of Legislation appointed under laws of more than thirty
States of the Union and meeting in Detroit, Michigan, in 1895, brought
this matter up under a resolution of the Legislature of the State of
Massachusetts requesting him to do so. Nearly every Southern delegate
and most of those from the West and from the Middle States were on
their feet at once objecting, and the best he could do was to get
it referred to a committee rather than have the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts summarily snubbed. This committee, of course, never
reported.

Undoubtedly climatic effects, social conditions, and dozens of other
reasons make it difficult, if not unwise, to attempt to have the same
rules as to hours of labor in all the States of our wide country. Boys
and notably girls mature much earlier in the South than they do in
the North; schooling conditions are not the same, homes