are not so
comfortable, the money may be more needed, the general level of
education is less. Doubtless there are still areas in the South where
on the whole it is better for a child of fourteen to be in a cotton
mill than anywhere else he is likely to go, schools not existing. The
Southern delegates resented interference with their State police power
for these reasons. The Massachusetts Legislature, on the other hand,
had in mind the competition of Southern mills, with cheap child labor,
quite as much as any desire to benefit the white or negro children
of the South; but the writer's experience convinced him that a
constitutional amendment on this point is impossible, although one has
been repeatedly proposed, notably by the late Congressman Lovering of
Massachusetts, and such an amendment is still pending somewhere in
that limbo of unadopted constitutional amendments for which no formal
cemetery seems to have been prepared.

Even as to men, the labor of the Southern States is notably different
from the labor of Lowell or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or even
Cambridge; while on the Panama Canal or in most tropical countries the
ordinary laborer likes to pretend that he is working eighteen hours
a day, although most of the time is spent in eating or sleeping.
Nevertheless, under the Federal law, all employees at Panama have
to be given the eight-hour day required by the Federal statute, the
Supreme Court having upheld that act as constitutional.

It is curious to note, in passing, the alignment of our courts upon
this subject of hours of labor and general interference with the
freedom of contract of employment. The Western and Southern States
are most conservative; that is to say, most severe in enforcing the
constitutional principles of liberty of contract as against any
statute. The courts of the North and East are more radical, and the
courts of Massachusetts and the United States most radical of all. I
account for this fact on the ground that where the legislatures are
over-radical, the courts tend to react into conservatism, and as the
Western legislatures try many more startling experiments than are
usually attempted in Massachusetts or New Jersey, the more intelligent
public opinion has to depend on the courts to apply the curb.
All this, of course, is a great mistake; for it forces undue
responsibility on the courts, at least tends to control in an improper
way the appointment of judges, and at best forces the mo