day of not more than eight hours."

"The abolition of the sweat-shop system."

"Sanitary inspection of factory, workshop, mine, and home."

"Liability of employers for injury to body and loss of life" and
"an automatically fixed compensation."

"The passage and enforcement of rigid anti-child-labor laws which
will cover every portion of this country."

"Laws limiting woman's labor."

All these measures except the first were adopted long ago, in
considerable part at least, by the reactionary government of Prussia and
are being introduced generally in monarchical and aristocratic Europe,
and I have shown that the eight-hour day has been instituted for miners
in Great Britain and that Mr. Winston Churchill proposed to extend it.
Mr. Roosevelt himself concedes that "we are far behind the older and
poorer countries" in such matters. But an examination of the action of
State legislatures during the year just past will show that we are
making rapid progress in the same direction.

"Social" or "industrial" efficiency, promoted by the government, is
already the central idea in American labor reform. Government insurance
against old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment is regarded, not
as the "workingmen's compensation" for injuries done them by society,
but as an automatic means of forcing backward employers to economize the
community's limited supply of labor power--not to wear it out too soon,
not to overstrain it, not to damage it irreparably or lay it up
unnecessarily for repairs, and not to leave it idle. Mr. Louis Brandeis
points out that mutual fire insurance has appealed to certain
manufacturers because in twenty years it has resulted in measures that
have prevented more than two thirds of the expected losses by fire.
Similarly, he says, "if society and industry and the individual were
made to pay from day to day the actual cost of sickness, accident,
invalidity, premature death, or premature old age consequent upon
excessive hours of labor, of unhygienic conditions of work, of
unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would
be rapidly reduced."[66]

This, as Mr. Brandeis says, is undoubtedly on the "road to social
efficiency" and its practical application will convince employers better
than "mere statements of cost, however clear and forceful." It will
remove a vast sea of human misery, and the process will immensely enrich
society. But like the o