ted States Supreme Court they continued to declare it
unconstitutional, simply saying that the United States Supreme Court
was wrong. Anyhow, it is obvious that in trades which involve a great
mass of the people, or affect the whole community, or particularly
where there are definite dangers, such as noxious vapors or
tuberculosis-breeding dust, it will be constitutional, as it is common
sense, to limit the conditions and even the hours of labor of women
or men, as well as children. Students interested in such matters will
find the universal legislation of the civilized world set forth in the
invaluable labor-laws collection of the government of Belgium; and he
will find that all countries of the world do regulate the hours of
labor as well as the conditions, in all such trades, and we should not
remain alone in refusing to do so.

The difficulty of regulating the hours of farm labor is, of course,
obvious, and so far as I know, no attempt has yet been made. The same
thing remains still true of domestic labor, though it has been more
questioned. It should be noted that both domestic labor and farm
labor belong to the class of what we call indefinite service. Now,
indefinite service must always be regulated very carefully as to the
length of the contract, which is never to be indefinite; that is to
say, if it be both indefinite in the services rendered and in the time
during which they are to last, it is in no way distinguishable from
slavery. For instance, in Indiana, many years before the Civil War,
there was an old negro woman who was induced to sign a contract to
serve in a general way for life; that, of course, was held to be
slavery. More recently the United States Supreme Court has held that a
contract imposed upon a sailor whereby he agreed to ship as a mariner
on the Pacific coast for a voyage to various other parts of the world
and thence back was a contract so indefinite in length of time as to
be unenforceable under free principles, although a sailor's contract
is one which in a peculiar way carries with it indefinite service. And
a contract "_a tout faire_" even for a week might be held void.

In all these matters the labor of women, and even that of children,
will very often control the hours of labor of men; for instance, in
the mills of New England, more than half the labor is not adult male;
yet when any large class of the mill's operatives stop, the whole
mill must stop; consequently, a law limiting th