nger hours than those named in the law, provided they were so
specified in the contract. A contract requiring ten or more hours a day
was perfectly legal. The eight-hour day was the legal day only "when the
contract was silent on the subject or where there is no express contract
to the contrary," as stated in the Wisconsin law. But the greatest
weakness was a lack of a provision for enforcement. New York's
experience is typical and characteristic. When the workingmen appealed
to Governor Fenton to enforce the law, he replied that the act had
received his official signature and he felt that it "would be an
unwarrantable assumption" on his part to take any step requiring its
enforcement. "Every law," he said, "was obligatory by its own nature,
and could derive no additional force from any further act of his."

In Massachusetts, however, the workingmen succeeded after hard and
protracted labor in obtaining an enforceable ten-hour law for women--the
first effective law of its kind passed in any American State. This law,
which was passed in 1874, provides that "no minor under the age of
eighteen years, and no woman over that age" shall be employed more than
ten hours in one day or sixty hours in any one week in any manufacturing
establishment in the State. The penalty for each violation was fixed at
fifty dollars.

The repeated disappointments with politics and legislation led in the
early seventies to a revival of faith in trade unionism. Even in the
early sixties we find not a few unions, national and local, limiting
their hours by agreement with employers. The national unions, however,
for the most part left the matter to the local unions for settlement as
their strength or local conditions might dictate. In some cases the
local unions were advised to accept a reduction of wages in order to
secure the system, showing faith in Steward's theory that such reduction
could not be permanent.

The movement to establish the eight-hour day through trade unionism
reached its climax in the summer of 1872, when business prosperity was
at its height. This year witnessed in New York City a general eight-hour
strike. However, it succeeded in only a few trades, and even there the
gain was only temporary, since it was lost during the years of
depression which followed the financial panic of 1873.

To come back to the National Labor Union. At the second convention in
1867 the enthusiasm was transferred from eight-hour laws to the bizarr