employer to discharge a man
because he is not a member of a union. This last will come logically
under the next chapter covering combinations and is not yet the
subject of any statute. Now the difficulty of these statutes, about
the discharge of union labor, is that it is almost impossible to go
into the motive; a man is discharged "for the good of the service."
It is easy, of course, to provide that there should be no written
or definite contract on the matter; but it is not easy to punish or
prohibit the discharge itself without such contract. Such legislation
has, however, been universally held unconstitutional, so that at
present this must be the final word on the subject. The right of the
employer to employ whom he likes and to discharge whom he likes and
make a preference, if he choose, either for union or non-union labor,
is one which cannot be taken away from him by legislation, according
to decisions of the Supreme Courts of Missouri, New York, and the
United States. Therefore, as the matter at present stands, the
constitutions, State and Federal, must be amended if that cardinal
right of trade and labor is to be interfered with.

In closing it may be wise to run over the actual labor laws passed in
the States during the last twenty years, mentioning the more important
lines of legislation so as to show the general tendency.

Beginning in 1890 we find most of the statutes concern the
counterfeiting of union labels, arbitration laws, hours of labor in
State employments, weekly payment laws, the preference of debts for
labor in cases of insolvency, the prohibition of railroad relief
funds, the hours of women and children in factories, seats for women
in shops, the restriction of prison labor, dangerous machinery
in factories, protection in mines, and the incorporation of
trades-unions. Mechanics' lien laws are passed in large quantities
every year and are the subject of endless amendment. We will,
therefore, leave this out for the rest of our discussion as after all
affecting only the owners of real estate.

In 1891 we find more laws regulating or limiting the hours of labor
of women and children, prohibiting it entirely in mines; several
anti-truck laws; two laws against the screening of coal before the
miner is paid, and in Massachusetts, laws against imposing fines
for imperfect weaving and deducting the fine from the wages paid.
Pennsylvania thinks it necessary to enact by statute that a strike
is lawful